


Sub Rosa

by cjr2



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Deathly Hallows AU, Fix-It, Legilimency, M/M, Major Character Injury, Not Epilogue Compliant, Occlumency, Post-Deathly Hallows, Severus Snape Lives, Slash, a little bit canon compliant, is that a thing?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:00:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 48,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3785794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjr2/pseuds/cjr2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Subterfuge is required to win any war. Following Dumbledore's death, Harry finds he must take up the mantle and become the master of carefully-kept secrets and studious misdirection. Luckily, Severus Snape is there to help him with the challenge, lest he bungle the whole thing up.</p><p>Alternate DH timeline, Snarry</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. July 1997

**Author's Note:**

> This is my take on an "alternate" Book 7, wherein Harry realizes that Snape is a spy and works with him throughout the events of that year. Many of the events of Deathly Hallows - I'd even venture to say "most" - remain largely unchanged in this story, but you will see certain differences as you read, which should be easy to spot. That said, I'm focusing only on events that directly relate to Snape and/or major plot points - which means that if you're not familiar with the events of DH, it may come across as a bit choppy, although I've tried my best to make it consistent without trying to literally rewrite the whole book.
> 
> Since this is concurrent with the canon DH timeline and utilizes a lot of the same events, a good portion of the dialogue is taken directly from the book - or taken mostly from the book while being significantly edited. No copyright infringement intended.
> 
> I will also poke fun at some of the events of DH that I've changed, so if you're liable to be offended by me screwing with canon or making fun of canon DH plot points, be forewarned.

_Dumbledore’s face was pale and slick with sweat, clear under the light of the streetlamp of Hogsmeade. He rocked against Harry’s side, barely staying upright._

_“It is…Professor Snape whom I need…But I do not think…I can walk very far just yet…”_

_Harry was confused, looking up at Dumbledore’s face trying to comprehend his words, trying to comprehend the situation. Why were they in Hogsmeade? What had happened to Dumbledore? The details all seemed hazy. He frowned at the Headmaster._

_“Sir?”_

_“Severus,” Dumbledore said insistently. “I need Severus…”_

_The scene shifted. They were at the top of the Astronomy Tower, and Draco Malfoy stood with his wand aimed at the Headmaster. Dumbledore was paler than ever, slumped against the stone rampart._

_“Severus…”_

_Dumbledore’s voice was slow and weak in a way Harry had never heard it. Dumbledore had always been old, but he had never looked and sounded so weak. The pleading note in his voice was something Harry had never heard before from Dumbledore, and it shook him to the core. He felt as though his heart was freezing in his chest._

_Snape took a purposeful step forward and pushed Malfoy roughly aside. Malfoy stumbled back a step, and the revulsion in Snape’s eyes was greater than Harry had ever seen—which was saying something considering the subject._

_“Severus…please…”_

_It was nearly a whimper out of Dumbledore’s mouth, pleading with Snape. Dumbledore’s blue eyes, usually bright and twinkling with humor, were dull and tired but strangely still filled with hope._

_Snape raised his wand arm._

“Avada Kedavra!”

 

* * *

 

 

Harry startled awake, sitting up in bed with his wand already in hand. It took a moment for him to get his bearings, until it struck him that he was in his bed in the smallest bedroom at Number Four Privet Drive. He was not Petrified atop the Astronomy Tower; Snape was not standing before him casting the Killing Curse at Dumbledore.

But even though Harry told himself that, it didn’t stop the subtle shaking of his limbs, nor the erratic staccato beating of his heart. He took a deep breath, loosening his grip on his wand. He’d taken to sleeping with it under his pillow; although he knew Voldemort couldn’t get to him while he was still under the protection of Privet Drive, it didn’t stop the wariness—or, apparently, the nightmares.

Harry had been dreaming of it nearly every night since he had returned to Privet Drive. He’d woken nearly every night clutching his wand, half-panicked and drenched in sweat. He hadn’t told anyone about the dreams, although he’d been half-tempted to confide in Hermione at least. He had a feeling he knew what she’d say—that it was understandable, after witnessing such a traumatic event as someone’s murder, that he would have nightmares about it. He had, after all, had nightmares about Cedric’s murder too, and about Sirius’.

This, however, Harry was certain was different. At first he’d thought like Hermione, that he was simply plagued by the trauma of the event and it was surfacing in his nocturnal hours, when he was least mentally guarded.

But even in sleep, he was more mentally guarded than he had ever been; for all that Snape had done, his words as he had fled Hogwarts had struck Harry deeply, and as a result, Harry had spent the entire month practicing Occlumency. Wordless magic he couldn’t practice yet—not until his birthday, when he was allowed to use magic freely. But if it killed him, he _would_ learn to keep his mouth shut and his mind closed; if anything, Snape had convinced him of the necessity of that when he’d overpowered Harry so viciously and easily.

Every night before he went to bed, Harry worked on clearing his mind; the problem with not having Snape to test him was that Harry had very little idea if his efforts at Occlumency were amounting to anything. He _felt_ as though there had been a change in him, as though he was finally getting the hang of it, but he had absolutely no evidence to back up the theory.

And as the dreams continued nearly nightly, Harry became more and more convinced that they had less to do with trauma or even with his anger and frustration toward Severus Snape and more to do with his mind trying to tell him something. The frustrating part was that he wasn’t sure what that something was. It was obviously something about Snape; the dream had been long and complex the first time he’d had it, following the events of the night Dumbledore had died—although his subconscious tended to tweak a few details here and there—but slowly, each time, it got shorter and shorter, until it focused on nothing but Severus Snape.

But not just Snape, no; Harry couldn’t shake the memory of Dumbledore pleading for him to get Snape and tell no one else, refusing the help of Madame Pomfrey. Snape was skilled at healing magic; Harry had seen it when he’d cursed Malfoy earlier in the school year. After Harry had seen what he’d done, he’d been convinced that Draco was going to die; there was blood everywhere, pooling around him, and Snape had been able to heal him completely, as if the whole event had never happened.

But Snape wasn’t a Healer, and the more Harry thought about it, the more he realized that it didn’t make sense to call for Snape instead of Madame Pomfrey, and certainly not with the level of insistence Dumbledore had displayed that night. He might have been weak and frail, but he had been perfectly lucid—lucid enough, even, to reason with Malfoy and carry on a perfectly logical conversation. So Dumbledore hadn’t been delirious or out of his mind when he’d asked for Snape; he’d requested Snape and only Snape for a reason, not knowing that Snape would ultimately be the one to kill him.

Or had he?

In the last week, that question had started bouncing around in Harry’s mind, and once he’d thought it, he couldn’t _unthink_ it. He kept remembering the look in Dumbledore’s eyes when he pleaded with Snape. At the time, Harry had thought that Dumbledore was pleading for his life—but he’d been perfectly poised and almost blasé about the idea of Malfoy killing him mere moments previously.

It left one fairly horrifying conclusion—that Dumbledore had been begging Snape to kill him and that Snape, understanding the message, had done it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

It seemed too horrific to be true, but perhaps even more horrific was the idea that someone as frighteningly intelligent and powerful as Albus Dumbledore could so completely trust someone only to be so completely betrayed.

Sighing, Harry switched on a light and looked at the clock. It was just after three in the morning, which meant that he’d managed about four hours of sleep. He felt even more tired than he had when he’d gone to bed, which he attributed to the recurring nightmare-memory about Dumbledore’s death.

He slid out of bed and padded across the room, barefoot, as he brushed his sweat-slicked fringe out of his eyes. He needed a bath, and badly, but he knew that the running water would wake the Dursleys, and things had been contentious enough between them as it was, what with him insisting that they needed to leave their home lest they be targeted by the most powerful dark wizard of their age.

Unsurprisingly, they rebelled against the idea that any of that was even possible, let alone the most logical course of action.

Harry shook his head to himself, resigning himself to the fact that he’d have to wait until later for a wash, no matter how much he wanted one. Instead, he picked up a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ from atop his trunk. “ **DUMBLEDORE—THE TRUTH AT LAST?** ” the headline below the fold read, and Harry scanned through the article for what seemed like the billionth time since the paper had come the day before. Every time the words in it filled him with revulsion toward Rita Skeeter—but the more times he read it, the more he realized how little Dumbledore had ever told him, how little he knew of the man’s past. Coupled with his recurring dream about the man’s death, Harry was more confused than ever about everything in his life.

All that remained certain for him was that he had to find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes. Everything else was unclear and up in the air, and with so many sources giving him so much information from so many different angles, Harry’s mind couldn’t wrap itself around things enough to make sense of them.

So he’d focus on the Horcruxes, on Occlumency, and on counting the days until he could leave Privet Drive for good.

And he’d wait until the Dursleys woke up before he had his morning wash.

 

* * *

 

 

The plan had been risky to begin with, but it had been well thought out at the very least; using Polyjuice Potion to create too many potential Harrys for the Death Eaters to adequately pursue sounded good on the surface, if objectionably dangerous for everyone involved. It had been planned and reasoned with Portkeys and different destination points and varying modes of travel—and, despite all that, had all fallen apart the moment they’d gotten into the air.

Things were chaos as soon as Harry and Hagrid got back to the Burrow following their harrowing chase. Mrs. Weasley was frantic, demanding to know where all the others were, none of whom had made it back to the Burrow by their appointed times.

“Haven’t go’ any brandy, have yeh, Molly?” asked Hagrid after they had been back for a few moments, his voice uncharacteristically shaky. “Fer medicinal purposes?”

Mrs. Weasley ran off into the kitchen to fetch some, apparently forgetting that she could use magic for such purposes, and Harry turned and gave Ginny a desperate look, waiting for information. Thankfully Ginny obliged.

“Ron and Tonks should have been back first, but they missed their Portkey, it came back without them.” Ginny pointed at a rusted oilcan resting on the ground nearby.

“And that one,” she pointed at an ancient sneaker, “should have been Dad and Fred’s, they were supposed to be second. You and Hagrid were third and,” she checked her watch, “if they made it, George and Lupin ought to be back in about a minute.”

The chaos only intensified when George and Lupin did appear a minute later. It was clear immediately that something was wrong; Lupin was carrying George awkwardly around the middle, and George’s face was covered in an almost unbelievable amount of blood. At first Harry thought that Lupin was simply supporting an injured George, but it became obvious in seconds that George wasn’t conscious. For a frightening moment, Harry thought he was dead.

Harry ran over and seized George’s legs; after a moment, he realized that the older boy was breathing and very much alive, if unconscious. Together, he and Lupin managed to get George into the house and onto the sofa—and in the light, it became clear what had happened. The sight of it made Harry feel suddenly queasy. One of George’s ears appeared to be missing, and the side of his face and neck were covered in blood.

Harry was shocked when Lupin seized him and started peppering him with questions as Mrs. Weasley and her daughter began tending frantically to George. Harry watched them out of one eye as Lupin accused him then scolded him for disarming Stan Shunpike instead of killing him, but Harry stood his ground.

“I won’t blast people out of my way just because they’re there,” said Harry. “That’s Voldemort’s job. I won’t become him in order to beat him. Then he’s won.”

Lupin seemed to run out of steam at that, lacking a retort. Kingsley and Hermione arrived a few minutes later, and after Kingsley gruffly interrogated Lupin to make sure he was the real thing, they exchanged stories about the encounter, about how Voldemort had been chasing Kingsley and Hermione before disappearing to chase the real Harry instead. Kingsley turned the round of questioning onto them next.

“What happened to you, Remus? Where’s George?” Kinglsey finally asked after his own story had been exhausted.

“He lost an ear,” Lupin answered dully.

“Lost an—?” repeated Hermione disbelievingly, her voice uncharacteristically shrill.

“Snape’s work,” Lupin confirmed.

“ _Snape_?” shouted Harry suddenly feeling irrational at the mention of his former Potions Professor. “You didn’t say— ”

“He lost his hood during the chase. _Sectumsempra_ was always a specialty of Snape’s. I wish I could say I’d paid him back in kind, but it was all I could do to keep George on the broom after he was injured, he was losing so much blood.”

Harry turned his back for a moment, taking a deep breath and gathering his thoughts. He let his mind roam over the memory again, of Snape and Dumbledore in the Astronomy Tower. Saw Dumbledore pleading with Snape, his once vibrant blue eyes dull and yet still so filled with optimism. After a few moments, Harry turned back to Lupin.

“Lupin, tell me _exactly_ what happened,” he demanded, his voice low and serious. Lupin seemed startled by the sudden change in Harry’s tone, looked about to protest for a moment before seeming to decide that he didn’t have the energy.

“We were being chased by a group of Death Eaters. When Snape’s hood fell, I recognized him immediately. He cast _Sectumsempra_ and it cut off George’s ear. That’s the entire story, Harry.”

Harry looked at Lupin seriously. “Why, though?” he asked suddenly, his thoughts roiling. “ _Sectumsempra_ is a deadly curse, and Snape _knows_ that. He also knows that no one except Voldemort is allowed to kill me—he kept other Death Eaters from doing it when they were fleeing the castle at the end of last term. Snape isn’t stupid—this doesn’t make sense.”

“F-flying and aiming a wand at the same time is difficult at the best of times, Harry,” Hermione said, her voice shaky but oddly reasonable. “Perhaps h-he wasn’t aiming for George. Perhaps he was aiming for Lupin.”

Harry frowned as he mulled over Hermione’s words, unable to settle on exactly what he was thinking. He’d seen Snape duel, had even dueled the man himself, and Snape was a skilled duelist. He was also, Harry had to grudgingly admit, skilled at flying, a fact Harry had seen himself when the man had served as referee for Quidditch matches in the past. Was it possible that he _had_ been aiming for Lupin and simply missed and hit George, who had been disguised as Harry? Harry knew that there had been enough animosity between Snape and Lupin that he didn’t have a particularly difficult time believing that Snape would be willing to cast such a vicious curse on his former classmate. But something was off about the entire situation, although Harry still couldn’t put his finger on what.

Fred and Mr. Weasley returned next, and George even roused enough to joke with his twin.

“You’ll be able to tell us apart now, anyway, Mum,” he then told his mother with a tired but sardonic grin.

Ron and Tonks were the next to return, much to Hermione and Lupin’s obvious relief. They all shared their stories of what had happened, Kingsley impatient the entire time.

But even after they all exhausted their tales, Bill, Fleur, Mungdungus, and Mad-Eye still hadn’t returned. Kingsley finally seemed to give up and sighed.

“I’m going to have to get back to Downing Street. I should have been there an hour ago,” said Kingsley finally, after a last sweeping gaze at the sky. “Let me know when they’re back.”

Lupin nodded. Kingsley gave them all a wave and began to stride toward the gate so he could Apparate away—and suddenly, a thought struck Harry. Before Kingsley could leave, Harry raced into the darkness after him without a word to the others, catching up with Kingsley just inside the front gate.

“Kingsley, wait!” he called into the darkness, and the man turned, a look of surprise on his face to see Harry there. He frowned.

“What is it, Harry?” he asked—and it was obvious that he was trying to be courteous but truly did want to get on his way. Harry hadn’t had the time to think through his words, so after a moment, he simply decided to barrel forward.

“I need to tell me what you know about the Death Eaters’ meeting places. Where Voldemort is hiding.”

Kingsley’s frown deepened. “You know I can’t give you that kind of information, Harry,” he said seriously, looking down at from Harry from his considerable height. “I can’t condone you chasing after him on your own. Or at all, really.”

Harry took a moment to reevaluate his approach. He knew for certain that he needed this information from Kingsley; he simply had to find a way to convince the other man to give it to him. Harry took a deep breath and spoke.

“I spent a lot of time with Dumbledore last year, before he died,” Harry said slowly, fighting back the pain that blossomed in his chest at the thought of it. “He gave me a mission—and before you ask, no, I can’t tell you what the mission is. Dumbledore made me swear that I wouldn’t tell, and I’m not going to dishonor his memory by going back on my word. Knowing this information—I have this feeling that it will help me with that mission. So if I promise that I won’t use the information to go after him, will you please tell me? Dumbledore sacrificed so much for this, Kingsley; his death can’t be in vain.”

The last bit seemed to be what got Kingsley; Harry felt almost guilty for using Dumbledore’s memory to manipulate the Auror in this way, but somehow, he knew it was necessary. Kingsley sighed deeply but acquiesced.

“He’s not in hiding, really—he has no need to be, not anymore,” Kingsley said, his voice almost sad. “He’s set up his home base, as it were, at Malfoy Manor. But you have to promise me you won’t go to the Malfoy Manor to try to take him down, Harry. Promise me.”

Harry nodded. That was one promise he would have no problem keeping. At least not until the Horcruxes were all destroyed.

“I promise,” he said sincerely.


	2. August 1997

Harry mulled over all the information he had over the next few days at the Burrow. The shock of Mundungus’ betrayal and Mad-Eye Moody’s death only strengthened Harry’s resolve for the things he knew he had to do. Master Occlumency and wordless spellcasting. Find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes. And, increasingly, figure out the truth about Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.

Even after Harry came to the Burrow, the dreams continued. He’d already woken Ron twice, as apparently he had a tendency to thrash and mumble to himself while he dreamed, but he had, for the time being, decided to keep the dreams and his suspicions to himself. Ron and Hermione, after all, did _not_ know Occlumency; the fact that they knew about the Horcruxes would be problematic enough were they, Merlin forbid, to be captured by Death Eaters and turned over to Voldemort. Knowing—even _suspecting_ —that Severus Snape was a spy for Dumbledore, even after Dumbledore’s death, would be positively ruinous.

And the more Harry thought about it, the more he suspected that it was the only logical conclusion. That Dumbledore had been pleading for Snape not to save him but to kill him. That Dumbledore had somehow planned it all, and that was why Snape had, even as he was fleeing the castle, tried to instruct Harry in how to survive even as Harry had hurled curses at him. That attacking George Polyjuiced as Harry had been nothing more than an erratic mistake of casting from atop a broomstick.

He had a tentative idea about what he was going to do with that suspicion, but everything had to wait until he, Ron, and Hermione left the Burrow—which would have to wait a few more days, since Ron had managed to convince them that they had to stay for Bill and Fleur’s wedding.

The next few days were chaotic; Ron, Hermione, and Harry planning their departure from the Burrow right under the family’s noses, a visit from Scrimgeour bringing them rather mysterious objects Dumbledore had left for them in his will, Harry’s birthday celebration, and—of course—the wedding.

And it completely discounted Ron’s argument that they should stay for the wedding, of course, when the reception was completely ruined by a Death Eater attack. Another unfortunate encounter with Death Eaters later, and they ended up holed up at Grimmauld Place.

Things happened in rapid succession as soon as they got to Grimmauld Place; it didn’t take even a day before they were able to put together that the mysterious R.A.B. was Sirius’ younger brother Regulus. It took longer for Kreacher to track down Mungdungus Fletcher so they could get information out of him about what he did with the locket after he’d stolen it, but only minutes after they’d found out that Dolores Umbridge was in possession of the locket, they’d decided that they needed to break into the Ministry somehow to steal it back.

All of this time was peppered with a slow dribble of accusations about Dumbledore and what had happened to his sister, first from Ron’s Aunt Muriel at the wedding and then from the _Daily Prophet_ ’s excerpts of Rita Skeeter’s book. Harry tried to put them all out of his mind as he continued to practice Occlumency and wordless spellcasting in his spare time; beginning to doubt Dumbledore at this critical juncture was not something he could afford—at least not until he spoke to Snape.

So when Hermione suggested that they take turns surveilling the Ministry in order to find a way in, Harry’s own plan began to form.

“You and Ron can take turns surveilling the Ministry,” Harry told them with an air of authority he was generally unaccustomed to actually feeling. But then, Harry was unaccustomed to having an actual plan; usually, Hermione was the one to come up with those. “I have something else I have to do.”

This proclamation was met by considerable resistance from Ron and Hermione; they wanted to know where he was going and demanded to know why he couldn’t tell them. Dumbledore had assured him that they could be trusted with the secret of Voldemort’s Horcruxes, so why, Hermione reasoned, could they not be told about this?

But for all Hermione and Ron’s protests, Harry felt it deep in his gut that he had to keep this revelation to himself.

So the Monday after Kreacher returned with Mungdungus Fletcher, Ron and Hermione took turns during the day surveilling the Ministry of Magic—and when they came back in the evening, Harry took the Invisibility Cloak and Apparated to Wiltshire, to the Malfoy Manor.

It was clear almost immediately that Kingsley’s intel had been correct, that the Death Eaters were using the Manor as a base of operations. Harry saw multiple Death Eaters he recognized Apparating outside the front gates and walking up to the house. Macnair, Dolohov, Bellatrix and Rowle all made appearances within the first few days along with several other Death Eaters Harry didn’t recognize. Harry felt a rush of rage when he spotted Bellatrix Apparating just feet from where he stood, but he ignored his impulse to curse her (just barely) and focused on his self-imposed mission.

Which was finding and speaking to Severus Snape.

A week went by with no sign of Snape, but Harry took note of every one of the faces he saw, all the Death Eaters whose names he didn’t know, should he encounter them again. There were a shockingly large number of people coming in and out of the grounds—and what most dismayed Harry was seeing former classmates of his appearing at the gates, including both Crabbe and Goyle with older men he assumed must be their fathers.

Harry was beginning to give up hope when finally, a week and a half after he began watching the front gate of the Manor, a familiar figure finally Apparated in view of the front gates.

Harry was seized by a whole slew of conflicting feelings at seeing the tall, wiry body in black robes, the familiar greasy black hair. Snape looked gaunter and greasier than ever, his flesh having taken on an almost jaundiced yellowish tinge. Harry took a step forward to stop him, but Snape strode past the front gates purposefully, giving Harry no time to act.

Harry sighed and resigned himself to waiting until Snape left the Manor; thankfully, no other Death Eaters showed up following Snape’s arrival, which meant that he must be having some sort of private audience with Voldemort and Harry wouldn’t have to contend with trying to get the man’s attention among a sea of _real_ Death Eaters.

That was, of course, assuming that Harry hadn’t made some drastically incorrect assumptions and that Snape himself wasn’t a real Death Eater. While waiting for Snape to leave the Malfoy Manor, Harry suddenly felt another niggling sense of doubt. Perhaps he _should_ have included Ron and Hermione in this; Hermione could have easily told him whether or not he was being logical in his suspicions.

But it was too late then; there was only a week and a half until the start of term, and with Voldemort taking over all the institutions, Harry figured that there was a chance that, Dumbledore’s murder or not, Snape would be able to return to Hogwarts. And if he did, Harry wasn’t certain of the next time he’d have the chance to get Snape alone.

So when he caught sight of Snape striding down the path toward the Manor’s gate, Harry didn’t hesitate; he acted. He took a step forward and, when Snape was past the gate, pulled off his invisibility cloak.

To his credit, Snape’s reflexes were as quick as ever; when he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye, he turned immediately, wand in hand. Harry wasn’t certain he’d ever seen Snape look truly surprised, but at that moment, he did appear quite befuddled to see Harry Potter standing before him. After a long moment, he arched his eyebrow in challenge.

“What do you want, Potter?” he asked, his tone sinister. “Have you come to kill me? Avenge Dumbledore’s murder?”

Harry, who had taken a gamble and left his wand inside his sleeve, fought not to react, not to rise to the bait Snape was setting. It was more difficult than he had imagined.

“That depends,” Harry said softly. “On if it _was_ a murder.”

If Snape had been surprised a moment before, he appeared well and truly shocked then. He lowered his wand slowly, regarding Harry with a curious expression, as if he had just spotted a new species of slug he thought might make an interesting potions ingredient. After a long moment, he took a few long steps until he was standing directly in front of Harry.

“We can’t speak freely here, Potter,” Snape said coolly, although he seemed uncharacteristically ruffled. After a moment, he held out his hand in obvious invitation. After a moment’s hesitation, Harry reached out and took it.

Harry felt the familiar pull of Apparition, closing his eyes against it involuntarily. When he opened them, he found himself in a dingy old room; it took a moment for him to recognize it as the Shrieking Shack. Harry gave Snape a questioning look.

“It kept the werewolf undiscovered for long enough,” Snape said in a contemptuous tone, one that left no room for interpretation. Whether or not he had killed Dumbledore in an act of mercy, he more than certainly hated Harry’s father and his friends; of that there could be no doubt. “Tell me what you want, Potter.”

Harry swallowed thickly, steeling himself.

“I want you to tell me the truth about what happened that night on the Astronomy Tower,” he said decisively after a moment.

Snape pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn’t say anything. Instead, Harry felt a probing sensation in his mind. Using all the strength he possessed, he fought to push out the intrusion; after a few long seconds of Snape rifling through his thoughts, he finally succeeded.

“Better late than never, I suppose,” Snape mumbled under his breath, although he seemed oddly pleased. “Why don’t you tell me what you _think_ happened, Potter, and I can tell you if you’re more or less of an imbecile than usual.”

Harry ground his teeth at the older man’s tone. This, he realized, was going to be more difficult than he’d thought. He’d imagined that he’d tell Snape what he suspected, that Snape would finally be civil to him, and then they’d be able to work together. But it was clear enough that even if he wasn’t as evil as Harry had originally thought, his fundamental personality still hadn’t changed. He was still a total prick.

“I think that you and Dumbledore planned his death in advance,” Harry said after a moment, fighting to keep his anger in check. “And I don’t think that it was murder. How am I doing so far?”

Snape’s face remained impassive.

“Go on,” he said dispassionately. Harry gritted his teeth even harder but managed to obey.

“Dumbledore already knew he was dying from that curse on his hand,” Harry forced out in a hiss of breath. “And it’s obvious from the conversation he had with Draco Malfoy that he knew Malfoy had been tasked by Vo—”

Harry hadn’t even gotten the whole name out when he found himself suddenly silenced; he glared at Snape, half annoyed and half impressed by the speed of his wandless, wordless Silencing Charm.

“Do _not_ say that name, boy!” Snape hissed through yellowed teeth. “Are you an imbecile or do you merely have a death wish?”

Harry tried to answer, but of course he was still silenced—and he was far from skilled at wordless magic, making it impossible for him to reverse the charm. He opened and closed his mouth repeatedly, getting more and more frustrated at his inability to speak. He glared at Snape, who glared right back at him.

“The Dark Lord has put a Taboo on his name, you thoughtless fool!” he accused darkly. “Speaking his name would have brought Death Eaters upon us as surely as if you had broadcast your location using the Sonorous Charm in the middle of Diagon Alley!”

After a long moment, the charm seemed to finally wear off, as Harry very much doubted that Snape had cancelled it. He glared at Snape for another long moment, but decided that answers were more important than raging at the man—at least at that moment. He wasn’t sure how much time Snape would give him, and he wanted all the intel he could get in that time.

“What’s a Taboo?”

Snape gave Harry a disgusted look, much as one might regard one’s shoe after stepping in excrement. He turned around and pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a few long, deep breaths, seemingly to calm himself.

“Doomed,” he murmured under his breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose as though trying to alleviate a headache behind his eyes. “We’re all doomed.”

After a long moment, Snape turned back to Harry in a swish of black robes.

“A Taboo is a curse on a certain word or phrase that, when spoken, will reveal the speaker’s location to the caster,” Snape said with forced patience, the same kind he always begrudgingly used at the head of his classes. “The Dark Lord reasoned that only those who defied him would be stupid enough to use his name, meaning—of course—that the most brazen of you are handing yourselves to him on a silver platter.”

A dark moment of realization hit Harry deep in his belly.

“That’s how the Death Eaters found us in Tottenham Court Road,” he said sickly to himself, leaning back against the wall of the dilapidated shack, his legs seeming to lack the energy to hold him up any longer. The fact that they’d been basically volunteering their location to Voldemort made him feel sick to his stomach.

And after a second, something else struck him, and he stood up straight in shock. “But we—we’ve been saying Vo—You-Know-Who’s name all the time at…Gri—I mean, where we’re staying…” Harry trailed off uncertainly. Snape sighed impatiently.

“Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, Potter,” he said tiredly. “The Dark Lord and all the Death Eaters know the three of you are holed up there. Not even someone as thick as you are could fail to notice a significant number of Death Eaters surveilling the place.”

Harry fought back the chill that ran through his body at the thought that Voldemort and the Death Eaters indeed knew exactly where he was. He’d known that Voldemort had at least _suspected_ their location, but the fact that the dark wizard knew for sure chilled him to the bone.

“Why hasn’t he just asked you to come in and get us, then?” Harry asked dully. Snape snorted.

“He _has_ , Potter,” Snape breathed sharply. “Thankfully, I managed to convince him that the wards have been changed so I can no longer enter the property.”

Harry stared at the other man for a moment, and suddenly all his anger at Snape faded away. For all that Snape hadn’t taken him to Voldemort on the spot, for all that he had helped Harry by telling him about the Taboo, it was the first time he had admitted to something that directly confirmed Harry’s suspicions. As irascible as the man was, the man was still on their side—and always had been.

Harry released a long breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

“Thank you,” he breathed softly after a moment. Snape gave him a rather odd look in return.

“I didn’t do it for you, Potter,” he said sharply, although there was an odd look on his face as he said it, one Harry couldn’t quite place. He frowned softly.

“All the same, thanks,” he said quietly, suddenly finding it difficult to be riled by Snape, no matter what the other man said. He looked at Snape again for a long moment, and it struck him then that the man wasn’t even yet forty—and yet he could have been sixty, for as haggard and harassed he looked. It struck Harry suddenly how much it must be costing him, keeping up mental shields all the time so he could lie to the face of the wizard who was likely the most powerful Legilimens alive. How much it must have cost him to kill Dumbledore, even at the former Headmaster’s behest. It was obviously taking its toll; Snape looked paler than ever, and the dark circles under his eyes had grown so large that they’d soon need their own postal address.

Harry sighed, sitting down resignedly on the edge of the dusty old four-poster bed. Snape regarded him with an expression not unlike one who had just smelled something very foul.

“What can you tell me about Vo— _his_ plans?” Harry corrected himself after a moment, tiredly. Snape regarded him oddly but after a long moment, he did begrudgingly answer.

“He appears to be seeking out a wandmaker named—”

“Gregorovitch,” Harry supplied breathily. Snape gave him a suspicious look.

“Yes,” he admitted carefully after a moment, giving Harry a wary look. “I’m frightened to inquire as to how you know this information.”

Harry picked at a frayed thread on the worn comforter. “I…saw it,” he admitted sheepishly after a moment. “Through his eyes.”

Snape looked even more disgusted at that pronouncement.

“What _is_ Occlumency to you, Potter? A parlour trick? An amusing pastime?” he drawled sardonically. Harry glared at him.

“I know it’s important,” he hissed angrily. “But Occlumency or no Occlumency, I can’t seem to stop the visions. If it helps, they only seem to happen now when he’s incredibly upset. I don’t think he realizes they’re still happening.”

Snape looked slightly ill at that pronouncement, or as if he had just bitten into something incredibly sour.

“No,” he mused quietly after a moment, seeming to be talking more to himself than to Harry. “Perhaps you can’t stop them.”

Harry waited for a long moment for man to elaborate, but when it appeared he wasn’t going to say more, Harry spoke up again.

“I think he’s trying to find out why my wand attacked him,” he proclaimed after a moment, looking to Snape for confirmation. “Ollivander couldn’t give him an answer, so he thinks Gregorovitch can.”

Snape’s frown deepened, but he didn’t contradict Harry, as Harry had almost expected he would.

“Yes,” was all he said, vaguely. Harry frowned in turn, but it was obvious that Snape didn’t have any more to say on the subject. But at least he wasn’t calling Harry insane for thinking that that was what had happened.

“So what do we do now?” Harry asked after a moment, feeling helpless. Harry had thought ahead to finding Snape and confirming that the man was still on their side; he hadn’t formulated a plan for how to use that knowledge in any precise manner, and suddenly that seemed like a huge oversight. Snape looked at him with a serious expression.

“Dumbledore gave you a mission, did he not?” Snape inquired after a moment, his tone sharp and impatient. “So what is it that you need to complete that mission?”

Harry felt himself falter at the question. He knew what he needed to do; he needed to find and destroy all of Voldemort’s Horcruxes, but he was at a loss of how to actually accomplish either task. They had located the locket and were attempting to retrieve it, but they still had no idea how to destroy it once they got their hands on it. And from what Snape was saying, it seemed as though Dumbledore hadn’t clued him into the specifics of the mission—and despite everything, despite all the horrible things he was hearing about the late headmaster, Harry could do nothing but fight to maintain faith in the man, in his decisions.

Even if part of him wanted to ask Snape for help with the Horcruxes, he knew Dumbledore wanted as few people to know as possible, and he was going to respect that if he could. Unless it came to the point at which Snape was their only hope. Harry sighed deeply.

“Time,” he said finally, his tone dejected. “We need time.”

Snape nodded sharply at that. “Then I’ll do my best to buy you time,” Snape said stiffly, seeming miffed that Harry hadn’t asked more of him.

 

* * *

 

 

Harry remained talking to a rather taciturn Snape nearly until the sun began to rise, although considering that Snape had Apparated them as far north as Scotland, in the grander scheme of things, it wasn’t very long at all. Snape, although obviously willing to help Harry, seemed wary about how many details he was willing to share.

“Obviously, Potter, if you suddenly become privy to all the Dark Lord’s movements, he’ll know that there’s a traitor in his midst,” Snape had snapped after Harry had asked somewhere around the thirtieth question that Snape had been unwilling to answer. The encounter had been contentious in general, but all the same Harry had gotten a lot out of it.

The sense of confidence Harry felt in the knowledge that Dumbledore truly _did_ have a greater plan and that Snape had been part of it was no small part of that either.

All the same, the sky in London was just starting to turn from black to softly purple-blue when Harry finally Apparated onto the top step of Number Twelve Grimmuald Place, Invisibility Cloak wrapped around him. He walked through the front door, dispelled the phantom Dumbledore with a murmured “I didn’t kill you,” and within moments was swooped upon by a rather haggard-looking Hermione.

“Where have you _been_?” she demanded worriedly, throwing her arms around Harry without preamble. Ron stood behind her looking rather sheepish; it was clear that neither of them had gone to bed the previous night. Harry frowned.

“I’ve been gone every night, ‘mione,” he breathed into her busy hair before she released him. She pulled back and gave him a serious look, as though he’d just said something very stupid.

“Never for this long before! Harry, if you’re not going to tell us where you’re going—”

Harry held up a hand to halt her protest. It was a similar argument they’d had nearly every day since Harry had begun staking out the Malfoy Manor, and every day he’d told her the same thing.

“You know that I can’t,” he told her seriously, and if anything, Snape’s characteristic reticence had convinced him of that. Snape had had the hollow, hunted look of a man constantly worried of exposure; it was the same look he remembered on Sirius’ face when he’d first met his godfather in the Shrieking Shack, and the last thing he was going to do was put any more fear in the man’s head by including more people in the secret.

After all, it was clear from what Snape had said that night that Dumbledore hadn’t even intended for _Harry_ to know the truth; the more people who knew the secret, the greater the chance for Snape’s exposure. And Harry found himself, unbelievably, wanting to protect the man he’d so long hated.

Sighing, Harry ran a hand through his disheveled locks. “There are some things I need to tell you two, though,” he acquiesced after a second, motioning toward the kitchen. “Let’s go into the kitchen to talk.”

Despite the early hour, Kreacher was already up and ambling around the kitchen, Regulus’ locket around his neck and a rather brighter way about him. It was amazing, Harry thought, how much a simple act of kindness and dignity could so thoroughly change even a being as misanthropic as Kreacher. Harry lowered himself into a kitchen chair with a deep sigh.

“Tea, Master Harry?” Kreacher asked amiably, taking Harry’s Invisibility Cloak and going to hang it beside several freshly laundered robes.

“Thank you, Kreacher,” Harry said as Ron and Hermione sat down at the table with rather wary expressions, waiting for him to speak. Kreacher returned mere moments later with a tea tray and some biscuits; Harry thanked him again before turning to his friends.

“We need to stop calling You-Know-Who by his name,” Harry said after a moment, without preamble. Hermione frowned.

“But Harry, Dumbledore always said—” she began to protest, but Harry just shook his head.

“I know what Dumbledore always said,” Harry agreed darkly. “And I know that I’ve always agreed with him. But You-Know-Who has actually put a curse on the name. A locator, so he can find anyone willing to refer to him by his name.”

Ron looked rather sick. “Brilliant,” he murmured into his cup of tea. “Bloody brilliant.”

Hermione rubbed her eyes tiredly. “It _is_ rather brilliant, actually,” she agreed, deliberately misunderstanding Ron’s sarcasm. “Only Order members and those who are against him would have the courage to refer to him by name. Merlin’s beard, Harry, we practically turned ourselves over to the Death Eaters when—”

“I know,” Harry agreed, still feeling ill at the memory. Hermione suddenly looked startled as he came to the same conclusion Harry had come to hours earlier.

“But we’ve been using his name here—”

“I _know_ , Hermione.”

“No, you clearly don’t if we’re still sitting here!” she protested wildly. “Any moment, Snape could—”

Snape, thankfully, had prepared Harry for this eventuality, had coached Harry about what to say when he ‘relayed this news to the only one of the three of you with half a functioning brain,’ according to Snape. Harry sighed.

“If Snape was going to come in here to get us, he would have done it already,” Harry said in as measured a tone as he could manage. “He must think that he can’t get in, or that we already have defenses set up against him. Or else all those Death Eaters would be inside here already, bringing us to You-Know-Who.”

Hermione still looked doubtful, but she ceased insisting that they vacate the premises immediately, which was at least something. Still, though, she didn’t seem ready to let the information go.

“How do you even know this, Harry?” she prodded after a moment, her gaze suspicious as she eyed him carefully. “About the curse on the name?”

Hermione was determined, but Harry knew he had to stand his ground.

“I can’t tell you, Hermione—I’m sorry,” he said softly. “It’s too dangerous.”

Hermione stood from the table and left her chair clattering to the floor behind her while Ron looked over in undisguised horror.

“This again!” Hermione exclaimed almost hysterically. “I thought we were past this when you agreed to let us come hunt the Horcruxes with you! When we decided we’re going to break into the Ministry of Magic—which is crawling with Death Eaters, by the way, have I mentioned? _All_ of this is dangerous, Harry? When are you going to stop trying to protect us?”

Harry frowned at that.

“Never,” he said sincerely. Hermione huffed and stormed out the kitchen at that, Ron watching her go with a careful expression. He turned back to Harry after a long moment.

“Well that went well, mate,” he said amicably, standing up and pushing in his own chair before carefully picking up Hermione’s fallen one and setting it upright. “You know, you may be the bloody Chosen One, but that doesn’t mean you have to take everything onto yourself.”

Harry sighed, rubbing his forehead absently, although his scar wasn’t aching at the moment.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you two,” he said slowly, unsure of how to make Ron understand without revealing anything to him about Snape. “But there’s too much at stake here to make even the tiniest mistake.”

Ron surveyed him for a long moment, looking as if he was going to ask Harry some sort of question before he finally seemed to change his mind. He shook his head with a low sigh.

“Neither of us have slept for waiting up for you,” Ron said by way of explanation. “She’ll come around.”

Harry nodded sickly, unable to find anything to say, unable to make sense of the messy situation he was in. Protecting the man who killed Dumbledore at the expense of his friends’ anger. Protecting the secret of the Horcruxes despite the fact that Snape could possibly help him with his search. It was about enough to make his head explode.

Without another word, Ron turned and walked out of the kitchen the way Hermione had gone. As soon as he had disappeared out the door, Harry let his head fall forward onto the table with a groan, knocking over his teacup and leaving its contents to spill on the floor.


	3. September 1997

Following Harry’s actual contact with Snape, he began taking turns with Ron and Hermione staking out the Ministry. Snape had made a plan to meet again at a prescribed date and time. Snape had insisted that the Shrieking Shack, so close to Hogwarts and on the outskirts of a major wizarding town, was too dangerous for them to meet again; however, he’d surprisingly been able to (on very short notice) produce a set of coordinates for their next meeting—which he had written down before forcing Harry to memorize them and burning the parchment on which he’d written it. He’d also prepared a second contingency, in case either of them was unable to make it, with another time and set of coordinates he compelled Harry to remember.

It didn’t take much for Harry to see why Snape made the ideal spy, although his reasoning for doing so was one of the many things about which Snape steadfastly refused to speak. At any rate, Snape insisted that their next meeting not be until the second week of September, the reasoning for which he also refused to explain.

Severus Snape, above all things, was infuriating, a fact made even more clear when Ron returned to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place on September 1 with a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ tucked under his arm. Harry and Hermione were sitting at the kitchen table, pouring over notes and hand-drawn maps that littered its surface. Ron, with a furious expression, threw the newspaper down onto the table, making Hermione look up with a startled expression.

“What’s happened?” she asked apprehensively, but Ron, seemingly apoplectic, just motioned helplessly at the _Prophet_ on the table. Harry and Hermione looked down to see a familiar, hook-nosed face staring up at them from the front page of the paper. Harry felt his breath stop for a moment at the sight of Snape’s face—had he been discovered as a traitor?—and then his heart stopped again as he read the oversized headline.

“ **SEVERUS SNAPE CONFIRMED AS HOGWARTS HEADMASTER** ,” it read in large, bold letters.

“No!” Hermione exclaimed in disbelief, snatching up the paper and beginning to read it out loud. Harry, for his part, was also furious, although not for the same reason as the other two. He felt it was impossible that Snape hadn’t known about this when he’d seen the man barely two weeks before; however, it was obviously one of the many things about which he had chosen to remain conspicuously silent.

_“‘Severus Snape, long-standing Potions master at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was today appointed headmaster in the most important of several staffing changes at the ancient school. Following the resignation of the previous Muggle Studies teacher, Alecto Carrows will take over the post while her brother, Amycus, fills the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor._

_“‘I welcome the opportunity to uphold our finest Wizarding traditions and values—_ ’ Like committing murder and cutting off people’s ears, I suppose! Snape, headmaster! Snape in Dumbledore’s study—Merlin’s pants!” she shrieked, making both Harry and Ron jump. She leapt up from the table and hurtled from the room shouting as she went, “I’ll be back in a minute!”

“‘Merlin’s pants’?” echoed Ron, seeming amused by Hermione’s uncharacteristic exclamation. “She must be upset.”

Harry grunted absently in agreement and picked up the newspaper, continuing to read the article about Snape. He half paid attention as Ron continued to speak.

 “The other teachers won’t stand for this. McGonagall and Flitwick and Sprout all know the truth, they know how Dumbledore died. They won’t accept Snape as headmaster. And who are these Carrows?” Ron said, mostly to himself.

Harry flipped through the paper, finding pictures of Amycus and Alecto Carrow inside. Two similar-looking pallid faces looked back at him, and Harry realized that he recognized them both; they had both been atop the Astronomy Tower when Dumbledore had died.

“Death Eaters,” Harry said hollowly, reflecting on what this change meant. It meant that Voldemort had well and truly taken over Hogwarts as well as the Ministry, meant that all of their friends returning to the school would be in grave danger. He exhaled deeply.

“I don’t see as the other teachers have any choice but to stay,” he said quietly, frowning. “If the Ministry and Voldemort are behind Snape it’ll be a choice between staying and teaching, or a nice few years in Azkaban— and that’s if they’re lucky. I reckon they’ll stay to try and protect the students.”

And hopefully, Harry thought to himself, Snape had enough goodness in him that he’d try to protect the students as well, inasmuch as he could without revealing himself. He refolded and dropped the newspaper facedown on the table, not wanting to look at Snape’s face any longer, feeling rage at the man for all the secrets he continued to keep.

“Well at least we know where Snape is now,” Ron remarked after a moment. Harry exhaled heavily.

“Yeah,” he agreed after a long moment. “At least we know.”

 

* * *

 

 

They had a plan going into the Ministry—not the greatest plan, of course, but the best plan that they could come up with without real schematics or inside information about what was going on inside the building. At any rate, it was more than Harry was used to having, as he was more accustomed to having to make split-second decisions about his course of action, not having any _time_ to plan.

Having time to plan, it turned out, didn’t really help matters; things went pear-shaped from nearly the moment they got inside. They managed to come out with the locket, but an ill-timed Apparition had brought Death Eaters inside the wards of Grimmauld Place and a second Apparition had left Ron rather badly Splinched and them in the middle of the forest.

It struck Harry, not for the first time, how little he knew of healing magic, how little he’d managed to learn during his six years of education at Hogwarts. Hermione, thankfully, had brought along essence of dittany, but as Harry looked down at Ron’s pale face, he remembered how easily Madam Pomfrey and even Snape had been able to heal even the most severe of wounds and wondered how he had never considered that healing magic would be a valuable skill to learn.

And on the eighth of September, at precisely eleven forty-two in the morning, he Apparated to the coordinates Snape had given him. Hermione and Ron hadn’t been pleased to see him leave—particularly Ron, who was taking his turn wearing the Horcrux—but he’d managed to convince them that it was necessary.

Harry found himself standing outside the gate of a rather odd-looking cabin; it stood at the top of a particularly lopsided looking hill, and the cabin itself also had quire a lopsided look to it. The cabin itself was painted a rather bizarre turquoise color, although it looked in desperate need of a repainting, as the paint was faded and chipped in many places. The front door was a rather absurd color of maroon.

Frowning to himself, Harry opened the front gate and made his way up the path to the front door. The cabin was, in the least, secluded; Harry could see no other homes in the distance, only trees. But he was still at a loss as to why Snape would pick _this_ as a place to meet.

Harry stopped at the front door, pondering; he wasn’t certain whether to knock or to simply open it. He was saved having to decide when the door flew open and a hand pulled him roughly inside.

“You have no instinct whatsoever for subterfuge, Potter,” a voice hissed, slamming the door swiftly behind them. Harry found himself looking into Snape’s dark eyes, the taller man looking down his rather overlarge nose in contempt. Harry glared at him.

“We’re meeting in a turquoise house—not terribly subtle!” Harry protested disbelievingly. “Shouldn’t we be…I don’t know—in a cave somewhere? On a secluded island? At the peak of a mountain?”

Snape just glared at him but didn’t speak, and it was only then that Harry had time to observe their surroundings. The odd little cabin was just as strange on the inside as it was on the outside; two of the walls were painted a pinkish color (puce? was it called puce?) while the others were a color of yellowish green that reminded Harry uncomfortably of armadillo bile he’d used in Potions. Every surface was cluttered with all manner of artifacts—some obviously magical, some less so, and the furniture was an eclectic mixture of styles that didn’t seem to go together in the slightest. A wicker chair sat beside a regal-looking armchair, across from a lopsided green sofa.

It barely took a moment for Harry to realize what the space called to mind for him. It was more colorful, certainly, but that was only because of the freedom to paint the walls that Hogwarts castle, all unforgiving stone, hadn’t provided.

“This is Dumbledore’s,” Harry said breathily, turning slowly to take in the entirety of the scene.

Snape nodded brusquely.

“Purchased under an assumed name, of course,” Snape affirmed after a moment, looking distinctly uncomfortable in the surroundings. “The Ministry has no record of it.”

Harry released a long breath. “Good,” he said slowly. “Then…we can meet here.”

Snape actually rolled his eyes at that.

“No, you silly imbecile, we most certainly _cannot_ ,” Snape hissed after a moment, his tone short. “Just because the Ministry has no record of it now doesn’t mean that an especially intrepid individual with an allegiance to the Dark Lord couldn’t track it down. We are meeting here now as a matter of necessity, as I had no other place planned. We will be meeting in different locations each time, Potter—it is the only way to maintain our safety. Not that you know anything about that, of course—breaking into the Ministry of Magic! What in Merlin’s name were you thinking?”

Harry whirled on the other man with a sharp glare. “I don’t know, _Headmaster_ ,” he hissed beneath his breath, still angry with the man for keeping such crucial information from him. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me, Snape? You had plenty of opportunities.”

Snape continued to glare back at him but after a long pause, he did answer.

“Plans weren’t finalized yet,” Snape told him slowly, his tone stiff. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up if the Dark Lord didn’t agree to giving me the post.”

Harry frowned at that. “Get my hopes up? What do we gain from this arrangement, Snape?” he demanded slowly. Snape gave him another one of those looks, like he was looking down at an improperly prepared potion.

“Access to Dumbledore’s portrait, which is invaluable. Someone with authority over the Carrows, who can keep them from killing innocent students,” Snape said, his tone low and impatient. “And what did _you_ gain from breaking into the Ministry of Magic, Potter?”

Harry felt himself deflate a little at Snape’s words.

“There was something we needed in there,” Harry said, slowly. “Unless Dumbledore has told you more…I can’t tell you what it was.”

Snape gave him a particularly dour look at that.

“Did you at least manage to retrieve the object for which you were searching, or was all the chaos you caused for no gain whatsoever?”

Harry shot Snape a particularly vicious glare.

“We got it.”

Snape looked particularly pensive at that pronouncement but he didn’t press Harry for any more details. After a long moment, Harry took a deep breath and finally sat down on the lopsided green sofa, which was adorned with an abominable crocheted blanket slung over its back.

“How are things…at the school?” Harry asked helplessly after a moment, hoping that Snape would deign to answer. “We haven’t…we don’t know anything.”

Snape shook his head but also sat down in the rather uncomfortable-looking wicker chair.

“No students have been killed yet, but a number of Unforgiveables and other quite heinous curses have been used,” Snape admitted, sounding almost guilty. “I prevent it when I can, but your little friends are already making an especial nuisance of themselves, and the other staff members are making a rather concerted effort to thwart my every move. Which makes it rather more difficult to keep my eyes on Amycus and Alecto.”

Harry suddenly found himself in the very uncomfortable and unexpected position of wanting to comfort Severus Snape, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with that urge. He rubbed his forehead absently.

“It’s not your fault, Snape,” he finally supplied awkwardly. Snape snorted.

“I feel so very mollified to be absolved of responsibility by the great Chosen One,” he said darkly, and Harry immediately regretted his urge to make the man feel better. He rolled his eyes.

“Fine, whatever,” Harry said petulantly. “He’s looking for something, something that Gregorivitch had in his possession but had stolen from him. Do you know what it is?”

Snape looked, once more, distinctly perturbed by the amount of information Harry had about Voldemort’s activities. His face turned even more pinched at that.

“I know nothing more than you do about his search, Potter. Considering the nature of his search, and the people he’s questioned, one would reason that it has something to do with wandmaking. A specific wand, perhaps, or a special wand core material. I can’t speculate past that.”

Harry stood up suddenly, throwing up his arms in frustration. “So basically, you can’t give me anything useful,” he breathed out angrily, beginning to pace the length of the small, cluttered cabin. Snape watched him with a dark but rather bemused expression.

“I don’t know what you expect from me, Potter,” he said slowly, his tone entirely calm. “You give me no information but believe I’ll be able to help you. I’m no mind reader—at least not since you began taking Occlumency more seriously.”

Harry stopped in his tracks, giving Snape a rather disbelieving look.

“Did you just…was that a _joke_?”

Snape’s expression didn’t falter in the slightest. “I suppose it was,” he acknowledged after a moment, rolling his eyes. “Just tell me what information you need, Potter, or we’ll both continue groping about blindly.”

Harry took a moment to ponder the question, wondering what would be safe to tell Snape. He knew Snape was on their side—or at least he hoped very strongly, but there was still that niggling doubt in the back of his head, the fear that Snape was playing a very long game and would turn on them again in the end. Without knowing Snape’s motivations, Harry couldn’t be sure, couldn’t have absolute faith in the man—and as such couldn't tell him about the Horcruxes. On the other hand, Snape had access to Dumbledore’s portrait, so Harry felt as though he couldn’t get away with telling him _nothing_.

After a few long minutes of thinking, Harry turned back to Snape. “You can do two things for me, Snape,” he said after a moment, seriously. Snape raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh?” he inquired lightly, almost mockingly. Harry ignored it.

“First off, you can ask Dumbledore’s portrait how to destroy a certain…something of You-Know-Who’s. He should know what I mean,” Harry fumbled, trying to find a way to get Snape to ask the right question without ever mentioning the Horcruxes at all. Snape rolled his eyes again.

“How frighteningly eloquent and specific,” he drawled. “You should be a poet.”

Harry simply glared at him, and Snape glowered back. But after a long moment, Snape sighed, seeming to tire of their silent scowling competition.

“And what’s the second thing?” Snape asked finally, impatiently. Harry pursed his lips, working up to what he wanted to say.

“You can teach me some healing spells,” he said finally, his tone soft and hopeful.


	4. October 1997

Harry and Snape made a plan to meet again in October. Harry wanted to meet sooner, wanted Dumbledore’s answer as soon as possible now that they had an actual Horcrux in their possession, but Snape insisted that they had to keep their contact to an absolute minimum. Before they left Dumbledore’s odd little house, Snape made Harry memorize another set of coordinates and another date, along with an extra contingency in case either of them was for some reason unable to make the appointed meeting.

The search for the Horcruxes didn’t improve. Ron and Hermione waited impatiently for Harry’s return, doubtlessly hoping that he would come back again with useful information about Voldemort and the Death Eaters, as he had the previous time he’d disappeared without explanation. They were visibly disheartened when he returned with no news, and Harry was no closer to being able to guide them toward the remaining Horcruxes or tell them how to destroy the one they already possessed. He wanted to tell them that he was awaiting news from Dumbledore’s portrait about how to destroy the things, but he couldn’t figure out a way to do so without exposing Snape—which left them with low morale, moving camps every so often as they attempted (poorly) to strategize their next move.

September turned to October and they were no closer to finding the Horcruxes than they had been when Harry had last gone to meet with Snape. They seemed to be hitting a dead end; all three of them grew more frustrated by the day, and their bickering increased seemingly exponentially each week.

It seemed as though there would be absolutely no hope until Harry was able to meet up with Snape again—until one day, they heard voices outside their camp. All three of them listened in rapt fascination to Griphook recount to his human companions how Ginny and some of the other students had tried to steal the Sword of Gryffindor from Snape’s office; Harry felt his heart stutter in his chest as he heard the words, although he wasn’t certain whether it was more because of his friends or because of Snape. It was even more troubling to hear Griphook’s gleeful pleasure at finding out that the sword that Snape had had moved to Gringotts in an attempt to keep it safe was, in fact, a fake.

“What happened to Ginny and the others? The ones who tried to steal it?”

The voice belonged to Dean Thomas, who Harry remembered belatedly had dated Ginny in the past. He remembered feeling monstrously jealous about it at the time, but at that moment, he had a difficult time summoning up that anger.

“Oh, they were punished, and cruelly,” Griphook answered casually, as if it made absolutely no difference to him.

Harry felt his breath catch in surprise for a moment; he’d talked to Snape a little about how Snape had planned to handle being Headmaster with two Death Eaters on staff, but Snape had never definitively said how far he’d be willing to go with students in order to maintain his cover. It wasn’t possible, Harry worried, that Snape would actually _hurt_ students, was it? But then, if he didn’t, would the Carrows suspect he’d gotten soft? Harry bit his lip, clutching onto his Extendable Ear like a lifeline, trying desperately to hear more.

“They’re okay, though?” Ted Tonks asked quickly, thankfully posing the exact question Harry wanted answered. “I mean, the Weasleys don’t need any more of their kids injured, do they?”

“They suffered no serious injury, as far as I am aware,” Griphook answered in a bored tone, and Harry released the breath he’d been unconsciously holding.

“Lucky for them,” said Ted. “With Snape’s track record I suppose we should just be glad they’re still alive.”

Harry frowned at that, only half paying attention as the assembled group changed topics, debating the merits of the _Quibbler_ over the _Daily Prophet_. It was mere minutes later when their voices began to fade away as they put distance between themselves and, unbeknownst to them, the trio’s camp. As soon as the voices were gone, all three of them reeled in their extendable ears and Harry turned to the other two almost frantically.

“Ginny— the sword— ” he panted impatiently.

“I know!” exclaimed Hermione, plunging her hand into her beaded bag without preamble. She dug inside purposefully, still mumbling as she did so.

“If somebody swapped the real sword for the fake while it was in Dumbledore’s office, Phineas Nigellus would have seen it happen, he hangs right beside the case!”

Hermione located the painting as she spoke, propping it up against the side of the tent as she fought to catch her breath.

“Unless he was asleep,” Harry mumbled with a frown, feeling confused and conflicted by what he was hearing. Dumbledore had tried to give Harry the sword in his will, so it stood to reason that he had wanted Harry to have it for some reason. The fact that someone had stolen the real sword was troubling to say the least—the fact that Snape didn’t realize was doubly so.

Hermione knelt down in front of the empty canvas and cleared her throat carefully.

“Er—Phineas? Phineas Nigellus?” she called tentatively.

Phineas Nigellus, unsurprisingly, didn’t appear. Hermione tried again.

“Phineas Nigellus? Professor Black? Please could we talk to you? Please?”

“‘Please’ always helps,” the man in the portrait droned coldly as he stepped into frame.

“ _Obscura_!” Hermione cried before he’d even come fully into sight.

A black blindfold appeared over Phineas Nigellus’s eyes, and he jerked and immediately took offense.

 “What—how dare—what are you—?” he demanded.

“I’m very sorry, Professor Black,” said Hermione, “but it’s a necessary precaution!”

“Remove this foul addition at once! Remove it, I say! You are ruining a great work of art! Where am I? What is going on?”

“Never mind where we are,” said Harry, having too many questions to deal with the portrait’s theatrics.

 Phineas Nigellus froze, abandoning his attempts to peel off the painted blindfold.

“Can that possibly be the voice of the elusive Mr. Potter?” he inquired, suddenly much more interested in the proceedings.

“Maybe,” Harry said inconclusively. “We’ve got a couple of questions to ask you— about the sword of Gryffindor.”

“Ah, yes. That silly girl acted most unwisely there— ”

“Shut up about my sister,” said Ron roughly.

“Who else is here?” Phineas Nigellus asked, glancing awkwardly from side to side as though that would help him see past his blindfold. “Your tone displeases me! The girl and her friends were foolhardy in the extreme. Thieving from the headmaster.”

“They weren’t thieving,” said Harry distractedly. “That sword isn’t Snape’s.”

“It belongs to Professor Snape’s school,” Phineas Nigellus corrected importantly. “Exactly what claim did the Weasley girl have upon it? She deserved his punishment, as did the idiot Longbottom and the Lovegood oddity!”

“Neville is not an idiot and Luna is not an oddity!” yelled Hermione, offended. Harry fought the urge to roll his eyes for a moment; he wanted to know what had happened to the sword and what Snape had done to his friends, and they were bickering like children.

“Where am I?” Phineas Nigellus demanded once again. “Where have you brought me? Why have you removed me from the house of my forebears?”

“Never mind that!” Harry cut in impatiently. “How did Snape punish Ginny, Neville, and Luna?”

The portrait paused for a long moment, as if debating whether or not he wanted to share any information with the barbarians who had blindfolded him.

“Professor Snape sent them into the Forbidden Forest, to do some work for the oaf, Hagrid,” he told them finally.

“Hagrid is not an oaf!” Hermione shrieked, but Harry ignored her, feeling relieved yet again. Snape had—somewhat unsurprisingly, Harry reasoned—made a very smart move. Giving Neville, Luna and Ginny detention in the Forbidden Forest more than certainly would have appeared to be a punishment to the Carrows, but Snape would be the first to know that time spent with Hagrid wouldn't be a punishment at all for them.

But it was so obvious to him that Harry wondered, vaguely, how they all didn’t catch onto the fact that Snape wasn’t truly trying to punish them. Harry glanced over at his friends nervously, but Hermione seemed too busy defending Hagrid’s honor to realize what an obvious gesture Snape had made, and Ron didn’t seem to be catching on either. Did they just presume that Snape was terribly unobservant, even after teaching all of them for so many years? Did Neville, Ginny and Luna think the same?

Hermione finally turned the conversation back to the sword, and some argument later, Phineas Nigellus finally deigned to answer when he’d last seen Gryffindor’s sword removed from its case.

“I believe the last time I saw the sword of Gryffindor leave its case was when Professor Dumbledore used it to break open a ring,” Phineas Nigellus finally told them impatiently.

Harry actually felt his heart stop at that, and he exchanged a wide-eyed look with Ron and Hermione. They barely noticed as Phineas Nigellus, offended by their lack of deference to him, shuffled out of the frame. Hermione shoved the portrait back inside her bag, barely paying attention.

“The sword can destroy Horcruxes! Goblin-made blades imbibe only that which can strengthen them—Harry, that sword’s impregnated with basilisk venom!” Hermione said excitedly, her words nearly tumbling over each other in her rush to speak.

“And Dumbledore didn’t give it to me because he still needed it, he wanted to use it on the locket— ”

Harry’s mind was working a mile a minute, words flying out of his mouth with the same speed as Hermione’s.

“— and he must have realized they wouldn’t let you have it if he put in his will— ”

“— so he made a copy— ”

“— and put a fake in the glass case— ”

“— and he left the real one—where?”

They stopped for a moment to catch their breaths, looking around at each other.

“Think!” whispered Hermione. “Think! Where would he have left it?”

“I don’t know,” Harry murmured, pacing the length of the tent impatiently.

“Somewhere in Hogsmeade?” she suggested.

“The Shrieking Shack?” posited Harry, remembering how Snape had taken him there, how even Snape had pointed out how unlikely they were to be discovered there when they used it as an impromptu meeting place. “Nobody ever goes in there.”

“But Snape knows how to get in,” Hermione argued. “Wouldn’t that be a bit risky?”

“Dumbledore trusted Snape,” Harry reminded her.

“Not enough to tell him that he had swapped the swords,” Hermione pointed out.

And all of a sudden, Harry felt deflated, like a balloon that had lost all its air, as the implications of what they’d discovered hit him. If Dumbledore had made a copy and not informed Snape, did that mean that Dumbledore didn’t _really_ trust Snape implicitly? He certainly hadn’t told Snape about the Horcruxes, and if he’d duplicated the sword and hidden away the real one without telling Snape…

The blood in Harry’s veins suddenly felt like ice as he wondered for the millionth time if he was making the correct decision in deciding to trust Snape, if Snape really _was_ on their side, or if he was just somehow playing into Snape’s—and Voldemort’s—hands.

Harry looked around at his two friends, frowning as he spotted Ron glowering in the corner. He mulled over it for a few more seconds as he looked between them, taking in Ron’s perturbed face and Hermione’s hopeful one. It was possible, Harry mused, that Snape could still get him the sword; perhaps if Dumbledore knew that Snape was in contact with Harry, he’d tell Snape where he’d hidden the real one. Harry pondered for another long moment before speaking.

“Don’t get your hopes too far up, but I might be able to get us that sword,” Harry said finally—and Hermione’s eyes widened almost comically. Ron, who had looked quite grumpy mere moments before, looked perplexed and then, after a moment, slightly relieved.

“How?” Ron inquired after a moment, finally joining in their conversation. “D’you know where Dumbledore hid it? When can we go get it?”

Harry frowned, giving Ron an apologetic look.

“I…have to go alone, Ron,” he said finally. Ron looked disgruntled again, but he seemed marginally reassured that Harry finally seemed to have some kind of plan when they’d seemed so directionless up until then.

“Oh Harry!” Hermione intoned impatiently. “I wish you’d tell us where you keep going.”

Ron rolled his eyes. “Who cares, as long as we can destroy this bloody thing?” Ron said, motioning to the locket that hung around his neck. “And while we’re talking about it, will one of you take it? This thing is driving me bonkers.”

 

* * *

 

 

Harry counted down the days until his next meeting with Snape, coming up with increasingly creative excuses for Ron and Hermione as to why he couldn’t just set off looking for the sword immediately. He wasn’t even certain that Snape _could_ get it for him, but as it was his only hope, he held onto it steadfastly. As Snape had insisted on varying their meeting dates and times, Harry Apparated to the set of coordinates that Snape had given him late in the evening on a Thursday, all the arrangements having been made by Snape, of course.

When Harry opened his eyes again, he found himself, legitimately, in a cave; he felt almost foolish for having brought it up the last time they’d met, wondering if Snape had chosen the location merely to mock him for having suggested that they only meet in desolate natural locations.

Snape was inside already; it appeared that he’d cast some Bluebell Flames in the middle of the space, which had the distinct advantage of burning without any wood and still warming the inside of the cave. Snape ducked his head minutely in acknowledgement as Harry appeared before him.

“Potter,” he drawled boredly, saving little time for pleasantries. Instead, he motioned down to a long, decorative trunk that sat at his feet. “I believe I have something you wanted.”

Harry gasped in shock as he looked down at the trunk; it was the precise size and shape that one would expect of a container that just happened to be housing a sword. And he had, he reflected, requested Snape ask Dumbledore’s portrait how to destroy the Horcruxes. He hadn’t told Snape in quite so many words, of course, but was it possible that Dumbledore had understood the message perfectly and brought him _precisely_ what he’d been about to ask Snape about?

Eagerly, Harry dropped to his knees in front of the trunk and opened it—and he couldn’t believe his luck when Gryffindor’s sword did, in fact, rest just inside it. But Harry knew he couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief yet; unfortunately, he didn’t have a goblin’s power of discernment, so he couldn’t tell by looking at it if it was the real thing or not. Carefully, he raised his eyes to meet Snape’s.

“I was led to believe that you’d moved this to a vault in Gringotts,” Harry said slowly after a moment, testing the waters. This was what would tell Harry if Dumbledore trusted Snape enough to tell him about the duplicate sword; this was what would tell Harry if he was making the right decision in trusting Snape.

Snape snorted disbelievingly.

“I moved a very clever duplicate of the sword to Gringotts,” Snape drawled, looking down at Harry as though he were the stupidest creature who had ever walked the planet. And Harry had never been gladder to be made to feel unintelligent by Snape.

“Why?” Harry found himself asking after a moment, reaching into the case to carefully pick up the sword. It seemed to thrum softly in his hand; he doubted that any fake, no matter how clever, could duplicate this feeling of raw magic. But, of course, most people had never handled the real sword, so it wasn’t surprising they wouldn’t know better.

Snape looked slightly disgruntled.

“Because the headmaster insisted that it’s important,” Snape breathed, seeming perturbed that he hadn’t been let in on the secret. Harry didn’t miss the way Snape still referred to Dumbledore as headmaster, either, as though he still didn’t see himself occupying the office he’d already held for nearly two months. “I needed to make certain that no one would go searching for the genuine article. It also has the added benefit of keeping your silly little friends from getting themselves into even more trouble.”

Snape sounded honestly put off by the behavior of Harry’s friends, and Harry couldn’t help but smile at that—that, and the memory of Snape’s punishment for them. Harry stood up once more, holding the sword in his hand.

“About that—thank you. For your choice of punishment,” Harry said slowly, and his words were sincere. Snape raised an eyebrow at him.

“That is, perhaps, the first time anyone has ever _thanked_ me for punishing their friends,” he remarked dryly. Harry gave him a half-hearted smile before turning his eyes once more to the sword in his hand.

“About this, though—I thought that you could only get the sword under conditions of valor and immediate need,” Harry remarked as he studied it. It seemed smaller than it had when he was twelve, but then, _he’d_ been smaller at twelve. It didn’t seem as heavy as it had once been when he’d retrieved it from the Sorting Hat in the Chamber of Secrets.

“You’ve already retrieved it once—I’m lead to believe that the sword remembers your past acts,” Snape remarked after a moment, pursing his lips sourly. “But if you’re feeling uncertain, please feel free to throw it off a cliff and dive down to capture it on broomstick, in the fashion of a Snitch. Or throw it to the bottom of a frozen lake and dive in to retrieve it. I’m certain both those possibilities would turn out well for you.”

Harry rolled his eyes.

“Is it possible for you to give an answer devoid of sarcasm?”

“That depends,” Snape drawled slowly. “Is it possible for you to ask a question devoid of stupidity?”

Harry opened his mouth to retort before forcing it back; no matter how angry Snape made him, Snape was his only window into Hogwarts, his only window into Voldemort’s regime. At Snape’s insistence, they met only sporadically, which meant that Harry had very little time to pick the man’s brain for all the information he needed. For all that he wanted to rage back at the man, he knew that it was in his best interests to reign in his temper, no matter how difficult that was.

And, after all, Snape _had_ brought him the one tool he knew of that could destroy Horcruxes.

Harry sighed, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes for a moment before replacing them.

“We’re getting off track,” Harry murmured after a long pause, barely managing to keep from sniping back at the man. “Tell me about what’s going on at Hogwarts.”

And, begrudgingly, Snape did.


	5. November 1997

Ron and Hermione were so overjoyed when Harry came back with the sword that Hermione only asked once how he had gotten his hands on it, and when Harry had refused to answer, she hadn’t pressed the issue. Destroying the Horcrux inside the locket did a lot to boost the trio’s morale; the low level of angry resentment that built up when one of them wore the thing was removed, and that, along with the knowledge that there was one less Horcrux to destroy, made all the difference.

And, of course, it took some of the stress off of them for the fact that Harry still had no idea where to search for the others.

Their conversations continued, speculating on the remaining Horcruxes and where they might be hidden. It seemed to amount to nothing, however, and as October bled into November, their frustration began to mount once again. The weather got colder, and as they knew better than to stay in any one place for too long, they spent a good portion of their time in northern England and Scotland, carefully applied warming charms and bluebell flames the only things keeping them from being truly uncomfortable in the cold.

Snape didn’t make their proposed meeting in November; Harry Apparated to Snape’s chosen location (it turned out to be a rocky beach in the south) and waited for hours, but Snape never materialized. After the first half hour of waiting, Harry pulled out the Marauder’s Map, searching for the little black dot labeled “Severus Snape” and found (rather to his dismay) that the man didn’t appear to be anywhere on the Hogwarts grounds.

Was there a chance, Harry wondered, that he’d misremembered the coordinates that Snape had given him? That would explain why Snape was away from the castle but why they weren’t in the same place. He could just imagine Snape mocking him for his stupidity in making such a pedestrian mistake, could imagine the lecture about how one moment of carelessness could cost them the entire war.

Another rather frightening thought had come to him—what if Snape had been discovered as a spy and killed? There was little chance that Harry would know about it if it _had_ happened; Harry doubted that the _Prophet_ would report something like that, doubted that Voldemort would want anyone to know how long and how easily he’d been deceived. It wouldn’t surprise Harry at all if Voldemort would keep that kind of news private.

When Snape didn’t appear after several hours, Harry returned to camp to meet his two friends; they looked at him hopefully when he returned, but, feeling dejected, Harry simply shook his head and retired to his bunk inside the tent.

He checked the map every few hours throughout the evening, hoping Snape would reappear, but the man never did, and Harry found himself growing increasingly worried by the hour. Ron and Hermione kept giving him worried looks out of the corner of their eyes over the next two days, but they seemed to have learned better than to ask him anything about the times that he disappeared.

And then, two days after their scheduled meeting, Harry checked the map rather out of habit, having convinced himself that Snape was dead—and was surprised to see Snape’s little dot immobile but in the dungeons, in what Harry assumed must be his quarters. Harry watched the little dot for a long time, but it didn’t move, from which Harry deduced that the man must be sleeping. Or, at least, Harry _hoped_ that was what he was doing. He knew that the map would show him the location of the Hogwarts ghosts; he wasn’t certain, however, if the map would show him the location of the body of someone who was simply _dead_.

But in the subsequent days, Harry saw Snape moving around the map again, reassuring Harry that he was decidedly _not_ dead, and Harry was surprised at the relief he felt about that. Not simply because Snape was trying to protect the students at Hogwarts, nor that he was Harry’s only source of information—Harry found that he had actually worried about Snape on the man’s own merits, which was surprising enough in itself.

Snape’s contingency location and time came a few days later; Harry checked the Marauder’s Map before he went, seeing Snape’s dot heading off the Hogwarts grounds, toward Hogsmeade. Feeling reassured, Harry bade farewell to his friends and Apparated to the second set of coordinates Snape had given him.

He found himself, this time, on an island in the middle of the ocean. Though surrounded by a small grove of trees, Harry could immediately tell how small it was, more of a rock than a true landmass. It was uninhabited, by Harry’s estimation; there appeared to be not a single structure in sight, although Harry could see a few similarly small isles if he looked across the water.

After about a minute, Snape finally appeared in front of Harry; Harry took a beat to survey the other man, trying to figure out if he was injured in some way. But Snape looked the same as he always did—harried and sallow-skinned but undamaged. Harry also thought he spotted a few grey hairs on Snape’s head that hadn’t been there before. A whole slew of words tumbled out of Harry’s mouth before Harry even realized that he was speaking.

“Sir…are you okay? You missed our last meeting and you were out of the castle for _days_ and when you got back you just stayed in the dungeons for so long—”

Snape eyed him curiously for a long moment, his expression perplexed, before something finally seemed to strike him.

“Ah,” he said more to himself than to Harry. “That blasted map.”

Something about the way that Snape had said the words made Harry feel self-conscious, as though he had done something deeply inappropriate. He bit his lip nervously.

“Sorry,” he said automatically. “I didn’t mean to spy on you. I was just worried.”

Snape rolled his eyes with an undignified snort.

“Much as your worry warms my heart, Potter, your theatrics are unnecessary,” he said, slowly. “Unpleasant…business for the Dark Lord often takes me out of the castle. It is unavoidable, hence why I created these contingencies in the first place.”

Harry didn’t miss the way Snape had glossed over what Voldemort was asking of him, nor the way that the whole situation obviously made him deeply uncomfortable. Snape had never, to Harry, seemed anything less than fully in support of his own attitude and actions, regardless of how detestable they might be; it spoke to how erratic and sadistic Voldemort had become that even Snape seemed discomfited. Harry frowned.

“Was it awful?” he inquired carefully after a moment, and Snape just rolled his eyes again.

“Very little that the Dark Lord does or wants to see done is anything but ‘awful,’ Potter,” Snape said in a deprecating tone. Harry stared at him for a moment before finding himself once more in the bizarre position of wanting to _comfort_ Snape.

“You do what you have to,” Harry said finally, and Snape shook his head, his greasy hair waving in curtains around his pale face.

“Don’t romanticize my role here, Potter!” Snape chastised, his voice barely more than an angry hiss. “Do you imagine I chose to be a spy out of _nobility_? A sense of right and wrong? You seem to forget that I am the one who _chose_ to follow the Dark Lord in the first place; I subjected myself to this fate.”

Harry blinked a few times, surprised by the man’s outburst. It wasn’t that he’d never seen Snape angry before—because he had, on more occasions than he could count. Snape had never been anything but a man with a rather vicious temper—but this was the first time Harry had noticed so much bitter truth in one of Snape’s rants, so much self-recrimination.

“And then you chose to turn your back on him,” Harry found himself reminding Snape after a moment, feeling oddly curious by the amount of emotion that Snape had revealed. “If it wasn’t a nobility or a sense of right and wrong, then what was it?”

Snape glared at him disbelievingly.

“Such a naïve little optimist as always. Bloody Gryffindors,” Snape murmured under his breath, running his fingers roughly through his messy locks. He stared at Harry for a long moment before seeming to realize that answering Harry would be a lot less trouble for him than _not_ answering Harry. He frowned for a long moment before speaking.

“He murdered my childhood friend, Potter—despite the fact that it was unnecessary and despite the fact that I begged him to spare her life,” Snape intoned harshly. “Make no mistake—there was no nobility involved. It was nothing more than selfishness, guilt, and a desire for revenge that caused me to leave his service.”

Harry stared at Snape in disbelief for a long moment. Not only because he’d never heard Snape be so brutally honest about himself—not even after all that Harry had witnessed during their Occlumency lessons and in the Pensieve in his fifth year—but because he’d never imagined Snape having a _friend_. Hell, he had a difficult time imagining Snape having a _childhood,_ and that was even discounting those occurrences during fifth year, when he’d seen snatches of Snape’s childhood and adolesccent memories.

Yes, Harry supposed that Snape and Dumbledore had been close in some way; it had been clear that Dumbledore trusted Snape, and surely Snape felt something for Dumbledore in return. Was that something friendship, Harry wondered? Did Snape have any other friends? In all of the snippets of Snape’s memories that Harry had seen, Snape had always been alone. Had Voldemort gone and murdered Snape’s only friend?

But Harry was stuck on one more thing—the way that Snape had referred to his childhood friend as a _she_. That was even harder to wrap his head around—that Snape had had a friend, and that that friend had been _female_. Suddenly, a rather horrific thought struck Harry.

“Not a…girlfriend?” he posed after a second, finding himself morbidly fascinated by the prospect of Snape having ever had a girlfriend. Certainly he didn’t seem to have had one in the years since Harry had entered Hogwarts, and the thought itself was rather disturbing.

Snape gave Harry a long look, as though once more decrying Harry’s total lack of intelligence. After a long moment, his face turned grim.

“No, Potter—she was happily married to another man,” Snape murmured flatly, his tone tired. Finally he sighed. “She was, however, very…precious to me.”

Harry thought about responding, but it seemed as though Snape hadn’t yet finished; Harry remained silent as Snape’s face turned pensive, and after a long pause, he did speak again.

“She was the only one who ever saw any good in me, Potter—the only one who believed that I was better than what I was letting myself become. And, of course, I took her faith in me and entirely betrayed it by becoming precisely the thing she claimed I was too good for.”

Harry stared at Snape for a long moment, feeling suddenly extremely uncomfortable at the older man’s uncharacteristic candor about himself, his past. Harry cleared his throat nervously.

“Well…perhaps she would be proud to see you now, to see the good you’re doing,” Harry supplied weakly. Snape’s response to his words wasn’t precisely what Harry had been expecting; he smiled slowly, but his smile was dark and sardonic.

“Perhaps,” Snape agreed vaguely before changing the subject. “So what would you like to ask about today, Potter? The inner workings of the Dark Lord’s camp? Longbottom’s incessant attempts to subvert my regime?”

Harry found himself smiling, warmed by the idea of Neville of all people having found the courage to stand up to Snape, regardless of how misguided his attempts were in reality.

“All of it,” he told Snape confidently.


	6. December 1997

Harry groaned as a familiar voice filtered into his consciousness. Everything on his body seemed to ache, emanating from his head seemingly all the way to his bone marrow, and he had a difficult time making sense of the noise, barely even able to identify it as a voice. His arm throbbed with a different kind of pain, like he could feel his pulse through it. After a muddled moment, Harry raised his other arm, the one that wasn’t throbbing, in a feeble attempt to swat the annoyance away.

“Harry,” the voice said quietly, barely above a whisper. “Do you feel all— all right?”

With some effort, Harry managed to wrench his eyes open; he was inside the tent with two pairs of worried eyes staring down at him.

Harry’s eyes slipped shut again with a low groan. His whole body seemed to be drenched in sweat; the blankets around him were damp and uncomfortable as he shifted.

“No,” he groaned honestly, forcing his eyes open once again. “What…what happened?”

Ron and Hermione exchanged a rather concerned look over his head before Ron finally answered.

“You don’t remember?”

It was clear from Ron’s tone that he should; Harry clenched his eyes shut once more and tried to think back to the last thing he remembered…

And then it all hit him suddenly, the inescapable feeling he’d had that they had to go to Godric’s Hollow, the same feeling that had been plaguing him for months. Hermione had been more than skeptical that it was a good course of action, certain that Voldemort would expect Harry to go back there, but between the combined nagging of both Harry and Ron, they’d managed to convince her to go just days before Christmas.

 He remembered going to the graveyard and seeing his parents’ grave, and he remembered finding the mysterious symbol from Dumbledore’s book on one of the gravestones. Remembered encountering Bathilda Bagshot—who wasn’t Bathilda Bagshot but was instead Nagini somehow wearing her skin like a suit—following Nagini-Bathilda back to the house, and then…

Harry reached up and rubbed his forehead, remembering the splitting pain in his scar. A residual bit of the pain seemed to linger there, making his whole body feel fatigued and achy. Harry took a deep breath and forced himself to speak.

“We shouldn’t have gone to Godric’s Hollow. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault, Hermione, I’m sorry,” he finally said, his eyes still closed. Hermione gave a very put-upon sigh, but when the next voice came, it was Ron’s, not Hermione’s.

“It wasn’t just you, mate—I helped convince her, too,” Ron reminded Harry slowly.

Hermione, on the other hand, seemed concerned about more than simply placing the blame.

“What happened, Harry? What happened when she took you upstairs? Was the snake hiding somewhere? Did it just come out and kill her and attack you?”

“No,” Harry responded after a pause, carefully opening his eyes. “ _She_ was the snake…or the snake was her…all along.”

“W—what?” Hermione stammered, sounding distinctly ill. Harry tried to shake away the mental image of what had happened upstairs in Bathilda’s house and took a deep breath, trying to explain to Ron and Hermione what had happened.

“Bathilda must’ve been dead a while. The snake was…was inside her. You-Know-Who put it there in Godric’s Hollow, to wait. You were right. He knew I’d go back.”

Harry opened his eyes to see twin looks of horror; Hermione, to her credit, didn’t appear at all pleased about being right that time.

“The snake was _inside_ her?” Ron echoed after a moment, looking at Harry as though he’d gone totally loony. Harry took a deep breath.

 “Lupin said there would be magic we’d never imagined,” Harry burst out after a moment, his thoughts tumbling over each other one after another. “She didn’t want to talk in front of you, because it was Parseltongue, all Parseltongue, and I didn’t realize, but of course I could understand her. Once we were up in the room, the snake sent a message to You-Know-Who. I heard it happen inside my head, I felt him get excited, he said to keep me there…and then…”

Harry remembered the gruesome sight of the snake coming out of Bathilda’s neck; he decided to spare the other two the details.

“…she changed, changed into the snake, and attacked.”

Harry looked down at his arm, only then seeing two rather noticeable puncture marks there. Hermione wrung her hands together nervously as she noticed the direction of Harry’s gaze.

“The snake bit you,” she said slowly, looking rather unsettled. “I’ve cleaned the wound and put some dittany on it, but it didn’t do all that much good.”

Harry surveyed the wound slowly. It was true that the dittany hadn’t healed him completely; there was still a slow trickle of what looked like a sticky blood-pus combination seeping out of the wounds. A rather stained rag on the floor made it clear that the wound had been seeping that way for awhile. Harry felt distinctly lightheaded at the sight.

It was only then that Harry looked around the tent, noticing the light that shone through the fabric. Something about that struck him, something just at the edge of his consciousness…

Suddenly, Harry shot up in bed, ignoring the way the world swayed around him when he did.

“Hermione, what time is it?” he demanded suddenly, flinging off the covers as soon as he remembered. His rendezvous time with Snape had been at eight fifty-seven that morning, and it was clear from the light that the sun had already risen. He’d been unconscious for hours.

Hermione looked flustered at the question, grasping his upper arm suddenly as if to try to keep him in bed.

“It’s just past nine, but Harry, surely you ought to rest—”

Harry ignored her, flinging his feet over the edge of the cot. If it was past nine, he’d already missed his meeting time with Snape; there was a chance that, were he not too late, Snape might still be waiting for him. That was, of course, if he wasn’t too paranoid that they’d been found out.

“Hermione, you don’t understand—I have to go,” Harry protested, standing shakily. “Where’s my wand?”

Ron and Hermione exchanged another nervous expression, neither of them speaking for a long moment. He glanced at both of them in turn.

“ _Where’s my wand_?” he demanded again.

Biting her lip, Hermione reached down beside the bed and picked up the remnants of his wand; it was severed almost completely in two, a sad-looking strand of phoenix feather holding together the cracked pieces of wood. Harry stared at it in alarm, feeling an unprecedented sense of panic; the wand was like a part of him, had been with him nearly since he’d first learned of magic—and he felt the same sense of unbridled panic he had when he’d seen Hedwig fall from the sky, as if he’d lost a friend.

“Mend it. Please,” Harry found himself begging, hollowly—although he felt a dull ache of hopelessness in his chest.

“We tried, mate—we can’t,” Ron said sheepishly. “Not when it’s broken like this.”

“What about Spello-tape? You used it on your wand,” Harry protested weakly, but Ron just shook his head.

“You remember how rubbish it was after that. Spells backfired on me all the time. You can’t chance that, Harry, not with the stakes so high.”

Harry wasn’t used to Ron being the voice of reason, but at that moment, it was clear that he was right. Even if they _were_ able to mend the wand with Spello-tape, the last thing Harry could afford was his spell backfiring on him when confronted with a Death Eater, or worse even, Voldemort himself. It had been mortifying and an inconvenience when Ron had accidentally cursed himself to burp up slugs; Harry accidentally incapacitating himself during a duel with a Death Eater would be exponentially more catastrophic.

And the only thing that Harry knew, at that moment, was that he had only minutes to get to Snape’s location before the man would most certainly leave—and then Harry would have to wait almost two more weeks for their contingency time. And it was always possible that Snape could have useful intel; Harry could waste time worrying about his wand later.

“I need to borrow one of yours,” Harry said without missing a beat, and Hermione and Ron exchanged their third nervous look in as many minutes. This time, it was Ron who protested.

“I dunno, mate—you barely seem as if you can stand, let alone perform magic,” he murmured, seeming apologetic even as he said it. Harry shook his head.

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Look, this is important—I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t. Please, will one of you let me borrow your wand?”

After a long minute of rather obvious hesitation, Hermione reached into her sleeve and handed hers over.

“Whatever you’re doing, be careful, Harry,” she said worriedly. Harry nodded wordlessly and made his way rather shakily to the door of the tent, repeating the coordinates of his meeting place with Snape in his mind, trying to make sure he didn’t forget. Just by the door, though, he saw what appeared to be a rather pristine-looking copy of a book— _The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore._ He turned and gave the other two a questioning look.

“It was in Bathilda’s sitting room, just lying there,” Hermione explained slowly. “With a note from Rita Skeeter on top of it. It sounds like Skeeter performed magic on Bathilda to get her to talk about Dumbledore.”

Harry mulled over that in his head for a moment before shaking the thought away. He could puzzle over everything later; at that moment, he needed nothing more than to get to Snape.

“Later,” Harry promised slowly, jogging rather uncoordinatedly out of the front of the tent. Once he was outside of the wards Hermione had set up, he Disapparated.

Moments later, Harry found himself in a fairly small bedroom; it looked like a room inside some kind of country inn, except that it appeared to be rather in disrepair. Not only was the room dusty but one window was missing a pane, and it appeared as though some sort of animal had charged through the bedding, leaving it half-torn and ragged.

But, to Harry’s relief, Snape was standing at the other side of the room, gazing out the window. His posture was stiff, his annoyance almost palpable.

“You’re late, Potter,” he breathed, his tone low and harsh. “Need I remind you of the importance of—”

Snape paused mid-sentence as he turned around and spotted Harry standing there, and the expression on Snape’s face left Harry no doubts as to how he must look. Snape seemed positively alarmed, and Harry knew he must look mostly dead for even _Snape_ to be worried about him.

“For pity’s sake, Potter, sit down,” Snape said, making his way across the small room in two long strides. When Harry didn’t react immediately, Snape grasped him by his upper arm and forcibly sat him down on the edge of the threadbare bed. “What have you _done_?”

Harry rolled his eyes, annoyed that Snape would think that what had happened to him had been his own fault. What was even more annoying was that Snape was _right_.

“Nagini,” Harry said simply, feeling grateful to be sitting again. He still felt uncomfortably lightheaded, and it seemed that even the small bit of physical activity had made the puncture wound on his arm seep even more grotesque fluid. “We went to Godric’s Hollow—”

“Godric’s Hollow!” Snape hissed in disbelief. “Stupidity truly _does_ know no bounds.”

Harry decided not to grace that with a response, watching as Snape reached into his robes and pulled out a small vial filled with a rusty reddish liquid. He handed it to Harry without preamble.

“What’s this?” Harry asked numbly as he took the vial into his hand. Snape made an incredulous sound and shook his head to himself.

“Proof that six years of Potions education was wasted on you, Potter, if you can’t even identify a simple Blood-Replenishing Potion,” Snape said darkly. “Now drink—you’re paler than the Grey Lady.”

Harry looked at the vial dubiously for a moment before unstoppering it and downing it in one long drag. After all, if Snape had wanted to kill him, he’d had loads of opportunities already.

Harry made a face; the potion had a rather coppery taste to it, as if he was drinking _actual_ blood in order to replenish that in his body. As he was recovering from the taste, another vial appeared in front of his face, this one a pearlescent whitish color.

“Basic antivenin,” Snape explained when Harry gave him a questioning look. With a shrug, Harry unstoppered it and drank it down as well. This time, he had to stop himself from gagging; the potion tasted simply _awful_.

“You carry all this around with you?” Harry inquired slowly after he had recovered, watching as Snape began studying the puncture wound on Harry’s arm. The flow of gooey blood from the wound had already slowed a bit.

“It pays for a man in my position to be prepared for all eventualities,” Snape said vaguely before crouching down, raising his wand over Harry’s wound and beginning to chant softly. It was the same rhythmic, almost musical chant he’d done over Malfoy’s body after Harry had cast _Sectumsempra_ on him—and slowly, after a second repetition of the chant, the bleeding from his wound seemed to stop completely.

“Paranoid bastard,” Harry said under his breath, but he was smiling as he said it. Snape glared at him.

“Sit still and be quiet, Potter,” he said harshly before returning to chanting rhythmically over the wound. The blood had already stopped flowing from the puncture holes; as Snape chanted the words again, the wounds began to slowly knit closed. After a long moment, he sat up and regarded Harry carefully.

“You already applied dittany to the wound, yes?” he inquired finally, his expression thoughtful. Harry nodded.

“Hermione did.”

Snape rolled his eyes at that.

“Well at least one of you listened during my class,” he mumbled under his breath before speaking to Harry once more. “You should continue to apply it over the next few days if you want to prevent scarring.”

Harry surveyed his arm carefully; the places where Nagini’s fangs had punctured his skin were still angry purplish circles in his flesh, but they were entirely healed over. He looked at Snape seriously.

“That was the spell you used on Malfoy,” Harry observed tentatively, part of him hesitating to mention the incident. It certainly wasn’t one of Harry’s proudest moments, nor one of his smartest. “What is it?”

Snape stood up, staring at Harry for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether his question was worth answering. After a long minute, he finally did.

“ _Vulnera Sanentur,_ ” he answered simply, his expression pinched. Harry pursed his lips.

“I’ve never heard another spell that sounds like that,” he remarked after a moment, and Snape gave him an impatient look.

“That’s because I created the spell myself, Potter,” he remarked, although he didn’t sound particularly proud of himself at that. Harry took a moment to think over the other spells that he knew Snape—the Half-Blood Prince—had created, how destructive they were. It struck Harry, not for the first time, how frighteningly intelligent Snape was—how intelligent he _had_ to be, to have stayed alive in such a precarious position for so long. Harry bit his lip thoughtfully for a second before speaking.

“Can you teach it to me?” he asked after a moment, his voice hopeful. Snape had already taught Harry a few basic healing spells, but somehow _Vulnera Sanentur_ had never been brought up in the discussion. Snape pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh.

“Next time, Potter—when you’re less than half dead,” he finally acquiesced, sounding harried.


	7. February 1998

One of the first things Harry did upon returning to camp with his friends (who were surprised but pleased to find his arm so adequately healed) was to read through Rita Skeeter’s book. It was with a morbid fascination that he read through the pages, through the whole sordid tale about Dumbledore and Grindelwald, the accusations surrounding the death of Dumbledore’s sister. It grew harder and harder with each page to remember to have faith in Dumbledore; with each page, Harry felt less and less as though he’d known Dumbledore at all.

The second thing they did after Harry got back from his December meeting with Snape was go to see Xenophilius Lovegood, at Hermione’s insistence. There they heard the rather bizarre tale of the Deathly Hallows and were attacked, yet again, by Death Eaters. It was becoming, Harry reckoned, a bit of a pattern with them of late, but then, it was likely becoming a pattern with everyone. Snape had told Harry, at their most recent meeting, that even Kingsley was on the run from the Death Eaters.

The frightening thing about the tale of the three brothers, about the Deathly Hallows, was that it all seemed to fit with everything that was going on. Harry became quickly convinced that the Horcrux Dumbledore had destroyed was the Resurrection Stone set into a ring, that perhaps Dumbledore had even hidden it inside the Snitch he’d left to Harry in his will. That his cloak, the one that Dumbledore had given him in his first year, was another of the Hallows.

That Voldemort, searching for a powerful wand, was in fact searching for the Elder Wand. It all fell perfectly into place, even though Ron and Hermione were reluctant to believe it. He became consumed by the idea of the Deathly Hallows, something that clearly alarmed Ron and Hermione rather deeply. Like with the independent actions of Harry’s wand, Ron and Hermione were reluctant to believe Harry’s theories.

As such, Harry found himself incredibly eager to speak with Snape again; his reasoning was that Snape had believed him about his wand, so perhaps Snape would also believe him about the Deathly Hallows.

Their next meeting wasn’t until early February, and the wait was almost unbearable for Harry; he wished he had a way to contact Snape, to set an earlier meeting time with the man, but Snape had been adamant about remaining as distant from each other as possible to avoid getting caught.

Harry, of course, saw the wisdom of that. He also found it incredibly frustrating.

So on their designated day, Harry eagerly Apparated to Snape’s new set of coordinates.

The place in which Harry found himself was quite different than their usual meeting places; it was obvious enough that it was on the outskirts of some sort of town, albeit quite a small one. Harry found himself inside some kind of old factory, although it had clearly been some time since the place had been in use. There was a thick layer of dust covering every conceivable surface, and some rather ancient looking machinery had been obviously discarded, some of it largely dismantled now, perhaps by criminals or even just mischievous children.

For once, Harry seemed to have arrived before Snape did; he took a moment walking the perimeter of the large, open room, watching in fascination as his feet left rather distinct impressions in the layer of grime on the floor. It was, Harry reckoned, quite disgusting.

When Snape arrived, Harry wasted no time before launching into the story of the three brothers. He was uncertain if Snape would have ever heard it; though Snape’s mother had been a witch, it was obvious enough from the memories Harry had seen that Snape’s Muggle father didn’t much approve of magic. He doubtlessly wouldn’t have approved of magical fairy stories.

Snape, however, held up a hand partway through Harry’s rushed explanation, stopping him in his tracks.

“I’ve heard the story, Potter,” he said impatiently, giving Harry one of those disapproving looks he got sometimes, the ones that said he wasn’t certain how he’d ended up collaborating with such an obvious moron. “And that’s all it is—a story.”

Harry threw up his hands in frustration at that; he’d managed to convince himself that Snape would believe him, but clearly he’d had too much faith in Snape. A laughable concept.

“But Dumbledore left Hermione that book in his will—the one with the story of the three brothers!” Harry protested adamantly. “It had the sign of the Hallows drawn on it! And Grindelwald, he was obsessed with the things, obviously—that’s why so many witches and wizards think it’s Grindelwald’s mark! And Grindelwald and Dumbledore—”

Snape snorted.

“Oh please, Potter—don’t tell me that you’re eating up the utter garbage of _Rita Skeeter_ ,” he sneered, managing to imbue the name with even more displeasure than he injected when he said _Harry’s_ name. “You, of all people, should know how notoriously unreliable a reporter she is.”

Harry eyed Snape strangely; it was the first time that Snape had ever acknowledged that the unflattering things Rita Skeeter had written about him were less than true. That wasn’t the kind of admission Harry had ever expected from Severus Snape.

Harry, too, was troubled by what he’d read about Dumbledore, but Snape seemed to be taking it a lot more personally than Harry was. And Harry had taken it fairly personally.

“Are you saying…was it all lies?” inquired Harry deliberately. He’d wanted it to be lies, certainly, but Skeeter had managed to dig up photographs, letters. It was difficult to believe that there wasn’t at least some shred of truth to the reporting—even if the source _was_ Rita Skeeter. And even considering how painful it was for Harry to admit to himself that Albus Dumbledore had been no less human than the rest of them.

Snape just glared at him in response.

“It was a few _months_ ,” he growled, crossing his arms across his chest angrily. “A few months of time in his youth, and everyone is acting as though that defines Albus’ entire character! He lived over a hundred years, and yet a few months spent with another teenage boy somehow _define_ his whole life? It’s despicable.”

Harry blinked, unsure of what to make of the outburst.

“Well those letters…they were pretty shocking,” he admitted after a moment, dully. Dumbledore’s words certainly had shocked Harry, at the very least.

Suddenly, Snape’s expression turned from angry to deadly serious, staring down at Harry as though he was penetrating Harry’s soul.

“Do you truly think less of him after all you’ve read? He was a lonely, isolated teenager who was swayed by a charismatic young man and delusions of his own grandeur. Do his youthful indiscretions nullify all the good he did after that? Does that mean he wasn't a good man?”

Harry stared back at Snape uncomfortably, suddenly getting the feeling that they were no longer _just_ talking about Dumbledore.

Harry had felt his own doubts about Dumbledore after reading Rita Skeeter’s book, but in the face of Snape’s words, those doubts seemed ridiculous. He _knew_ Dumbledore was a good man, even if he’d sometimes had to make difficult choices for the greater good. Dumbledore may have speculated about Muggle and Muggleborn inferiority when he’d been a teen, but he’d been a tireless advocate of equality ever since. Harry shuddered to think of what it would be like if he or Ron were judged for the rest of their lives for some of the less than savory comments they may have made over the years.

And Snape…well, perhaps Snape was the same. A man who had made poor choices— _deadly_ choices—in his youth, and who had spent the remainder of his life trying to atone for those choices. But did simply having a less likeable personality make him less of a good man than Dumbledore?

Suddenly feeling uncomfortable, Harry changed the subject.

“Look—let’s just entertain the thought, for a moment, that the Deathly Hallows exist,” Harry said evenly, never breaking Snape’s gaze. “What if the thing that V— _he_ is after is the Elder Wand? What if he’s looking for it because he thinks it’s powerful enough to overcome whatever made my wand attack him that night?”

Harry tried not to think of his wand as he spoke, of the terrible fate it had met. That wand would never be saving his life like that again.

Snape, who had doubtlessly noticed that Harry was carrying Hermione’s, didn’t comment on it. Instead, his expression turned suddenly pensive as he tapped the tip of his pointed chin thoughtfully.

“If the Dark Lord were to believe that such a powerful artifact to exist, he _would_ doubtlessly desire to possess it,” Snape mused aloud after a moment. “He wouldn't be able to resist the lure of that kind of power.”

“We at least shouldn’t dismiss the idea outright,” Harry pointed out, feeling mollified by the fact that Snape seemed at least willing to consider the _idea_. Snape pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn’t argue the point.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” he finally acquiesced. “And I’ll ask Albus’ portrait about the Deathly Hallows, but I would caution you about getting too caught up in the lure of a children’s story. It’s more than likely a parable—nothing more.”

Harry shrugged, although he wasn’t about to give up his theory just because Snape was a cynical bastard.

“Maybe,” he acquiesced quietly, scuffing up a rather significant cloud of soot with his shoe as he shifted awkwardly. He frowned at it. “Where _are_ we, Snape? It’s filthy.”

Snape looked, if anything, a little insulted by the question.

“An abandoned mill just outside Cokeworth,” Snape said after a moment, his expression dour. After a moment, he uncharacteristically offered more. “I grew on the other side of town.”

Harry frowned; there was something about the name of the place that struck a chord in his memory, but he couldn’t quite remember why. But after a long moment of consideration, it struck him.

“My mum was from Cokeworth,” Harry mused, remembering an overheard discussion between his aunt and uncle. Snape gave him a bored look.

“I know,” he drawled, tiredly.

Harry stared at him for a long moment, wondering at the oddness of Snape’s comment about growing up here, his bizarre tone, the comment about Harry’s mother—and then, suddenly, it was all clear. His breath caught in his throat.

“Your childhood friend, the one You-Know-Who killed—it wasn't… _my mum_?” he asked disbelievingly. Snape didn’t say anything in response, but his guilty look was answer enough. Harry stared at him blankly.

“That’s…impossible,” Harry intoned dully. “You…you were in Slytherin. She was in Gryffindor.”

Snape rolled his eyes in a rather self-deprecating manner.

“That was the opinion of most of our peers as well,” he affirmed. “However, our…association predated Hogwarts. Predated our Sorting.”

Snape turned away from Harry, walking to stand in front of the grime-covered window. He seemed to be staring out of it, although whether or not he could see anything through the filthy pane was a mystery. Harry felt numb, dumbstruck by the sudden revelation.

“But she died…because of you,” Harry said vaguely after a long pause, although his tone was more perplexed than accusatory. “Because of the prophecy you delivered to…You-Know-Who.”

“Yes,” Snape affirmed simply, his tone ripe with exhaustion. “Absurdly, I didn’t realize he’d connect it to Lily when I relayed it to him. I begged the Dark Lord to spare her life. He refused.”

Harry stared at Snape’s back for a long moment, unable to fully process what he was hearing. That Snape had grown up in the same town as his mother, that they’d been friends. And Harry now knew, from what Snape had already told him, that Voldemort’s refusal to spare the life of Snape’s childhood friend was the reason he’d switched sides.

His refusal to spare _Lily Potter’s_ life.

Harry swallowed thickly.

“You loved her,” he said slowly after a moment. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Snape affirmed tonelessly, his gaze still affixed on the dirt-covered window. Harry frowned as something rather alarming struck him.

“Then…in another world, you could have been my father.”

The words sounded strange rolling off Harry’s tongue, as though he was speaking a foreign language he hadn’t quite mastered. Snape finally turned back to Harry, his face radiating obvious disgust at the prospect.

“That’s preposterous on so many levels, Potter,” Snape drawled. “Genetically speaking, if anyone other than James Potter had been your father, you wouldn't be _you_. Not to mention the fact that your mother and I were never… _involved_ in that manner.”

Harry felt a sudden rush of confusion at that, even as he felt relieved. The idea of Snape having sex with his mother left a rather disturbing taste in his mouth.

“But…you said you loved her. Surely you wanted…?”

Snape sighed, as though he’d suddenly realized once more that he was talking to an imbecile.

“Yes, Potter, I loved her—loved her in the same sense I imagine you might say you love Ms. Granger,” Snape said, tiredly, as though he no longer had enough energy to keep up any pretense. “I likely even would have married your mother, had she been amenable to the idea. But I had a lot of things to learn, Potter—first and foremost that while your mother had been a true friend to me, I had held her up as more of a romantic ideal than a whole person. Second of which being that she lacked the proper…equipment to pique my interest in that way.”

It took a long moment for Harry to process what Snape had said. And when he did, he felt his cheeks heat in embarrassment. He’d thought that the last thing he wanted was to imagine Snape having sex with his mum, but imagining Snape buggering blokes was almost worse. Harry gave Snape what he hoped was a dark look.

“Why are you telling me this?” he demanded after a moment, torn between wanting to ask more about his mother and hating Snape all over again for getting her—both of his parents, really—killed. Snape was, as expected, unintimidated by the glare.

“I very much doubt both of us will survive this, Potter.” Snape said the words without a hint of regret, his tone dark but matter-of-fact. “I thought you deserved to know the truth.”

Harry gawped at him.

“The truth about you buggering blokes?” he asked disbelievingly. Snape gave him that deprecating look again.

“The truth about your mother, her kindness—her willingness to befriend even one so undeserving as myself,” Snape finally answered in a slow, measured tone. “That if this war is won, and if my actions play even a small part in the outcome, that that is because of your mother. Not due to any valor on my part.”

Harry stared at Snape for a long moment, trying to remind himself that he hated the man. And he did, in a way; Snape had spent years being petty and spiteful toward him, still insulted and demeaned him nearly every chance he got. But he’d also gone out of his way to help Harry on more than one occasion, constantly put his life at risk by trying to protect the students at Hogwarts, by even meeting with Harry at all. Harry looked at Snape at that moment and still saw an ugly man, a spiteful man—and he also saw a man who hated _himself_ far more than Harry ever had or _could_ hate him.

Snape had as good as killed Harry’s parents, but looking at Snape’s bitter, exhausted face, Harry also got the feeling that Snape had already punished himself for that act more than Harry could ever punish him.

After a long silence, Harry sighed tiredly.

“It can’t _all_ be my mother, Snape,” Harry said softly after a moment. “Some part of it is you. Whether you call that bravery, or loyalty, or something entirely different, some of it _is_ you.”

Snape looked, if possible, even more disgusted by that comment.

“More the fool are you, then, to believe such nonsense,” he spit out after a lengthy pause, seeming oddly taken aback by Harry’s words. Harry just shrugged.

“I’d rather be a fool than a cynical, self-loathing prick,” Harry bit out, although there wasn’t much heat in his voice. To his surprise, Snape barked out a short—though mostly humourless—laugh.

“I suppose _anything_ is preferable to being like me,” he agreed darkly after a moment, and it was clear that the subject was closed.


	8. March 1998

They had been so careful— _so careful_ —and all it had taken was a slip of the tongue in the heat of the moment to completely undermine all their precautions. Harry didn’t know how it had happened—how, in the heat of the moment, he’d managed to simply utter Voldemort’s name. He thought he’d trained himself out of the habit; he thought that he’d totally stricken Voldemort’s name from his vocabulary.

It had started out fairly innocuously; Snape had informed Harry at their previous meeting about a pirate radio broadcast he’d become aware of, called “Potterwatch.” Ron had managed to guess the password (Albus) to tune into the broadcast—and at the news that Voldemort was abroad, the seeming confirmation that he was searching for the Elder Wand, despite Ron and Hermione and even _Snape_ being unwilling to believe him that such a thing even existed, Harry had, in the heat of the moment, referred to Voldemort by name.

It was, perhaps, the worst mistake Harry had ever made; he still couldn’t quite come to terms with the fact that he’d gotten Hermione tortured, gotten Dobby killed. The memory of the event was etched painfully into Harry’s mind; he’d never forget Dobby’s large, lifeless eyes, never forget the sound of Hermione’s pained screams.

And it was clear enough that Snape would never let him forget his own stupidity when he Apparated to the location of their next meeting (oddly, the middle of a rather large field of sheep somewhere in southern Ireland) and was confronted immediately by Snape’s angry voice.

“What in Merlin’s name were you _thinking_?”

Several sheep—all painted with a pink streak across their side—bleated loudly in surprise and ran in the opposite direction. Harry closed his eyes, still recovering from the bizarre feeling of Apparition; he let Snape’s angry voice wash over him, feeling—for once—that he had earned every bit of Snape’s ire and then some. He took a deep breath.

“I wasn’t,” he admitted tiredly after a moment. “That much should be obvious.”

Snape, however, didn’t seem mollified by Harry’s easy admission of fault.

“You reckless, _idiotic_ little boy—do you not realize how _close_ you came to costing us all this war? To making every single thing we’ve done up until now for _nothing_? Are you truly so careless that—”

“ _YES_!” Harry burst out angrily after a moment, unable to stay silent through the other man’s rant. “Yes, I _am_ that careless, and I _am_ an idiot, all right?”

Harry huffed in a few labored breaths, surprised by how unhinged he suddenly felt, how close to tears. Snape seemed taken aback by Harry’s outburst; he frowned, staring at Harry for a long moment, before raking his hand through his greasy hair in frustration.

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose us the war a few days ago,” he finally said, his tone low and critical. “Especially considering that the Dark Lord is now in possession of the Elder Wand.”

Harry was so stunned by what Snape had said that he couldn’t respond for a long moment; Snape had been quite convinced, the last time that they had met, that the Hallows weren’t even real. He’d changed his tune quite quickly—and that fact alone was distracting enough that Harry forgot his looming guilt for a moment.

“How did you know?” Harry inquired after a moment, curious. Snape frowned deeply.

“Albus—his portrait—instructed me to _let_ the Dark Lord take it,” Snape said after a moment, sounding extremely puzzled as he said it. “I had removed the wand from his tomb—although Albus was certain that it wouldn’t work properly for the Dark Lord, because he hadn’t won mastery of the thing—but then Phineas Nigellus Black appeared in his portrait and detailed the events at Malfoy Manor—”

Harry’s eyes widened as he heard Snape’s words.

“Phineas Nigellus?” he demanded after a moment. “How did he know—?”

Snape actually rolled his eyes at that. “Honestly, Potter, does it truly shock you that a relative of Narcissa Malfoy—and a rather prestigious one at that—has a portrait in Malfoy Manor? He saw the whole thing, apparently from a nearby portrait of Abraxas Malfoy.”

Harry frowned in return at that. It truly was a good thing they had blindfolded the former headmaster every time he’d visited the portrait Hermione had carried in her bag; who _knew_ how many portraits the man had, or how loose his lips might be? Harry shook his head to himself; Phineas Nigellus wasn’t the important thing to focus on at that moment, although Harry made a mental note to make sure Hermione _always_ put the blindfold on the man.

“Phineas Nigellus appeared in his portrait…?” Harry prodded after a moment, when it seemed that Snape had gotten sidetracked from his tale by his opportunity to insult Harry once more. Snape seemed startled for a moment before he continued his tale.

“He related the events of that night at the Manor, and suddenly Albus was determined that the Dark Lord should get the wand. He all but ordered me to replace it in his tomb,” Snape said, shuddering a little as he said it, as if remembering the act.  “And not a moment too soon. The Dark Lord appeared on the Hogwarts grounds not hours later, opening the late Headmaster’s tomb to take the wand for himself.”

Harry frowned at Snape’s tale, once again unable to reason out Dumbledore’s motives. Even if Dumbledore was convinced that the Elder Wand would not work properly for Voldemort, why would he _want_ Voldemort to have it? Why would he order Snape to desecrate his tomb for a _second_ time in order to replace it? And what did Harry’s time in the Malfoy Manor have to do with the Elder Wand at all?

“I don’t suppose Dumbledore _told_ you why he wanted You-Know-Who to have the wand?” Harry inquired after a moment, although he felt that he already knew the answer. Snape looked positively disgruntled.

“Having constant access to the man is much less helpful than you might imagine,” was all he said by way of a response. It was pretty much all Harry had expected. Harry sighed.

“Speaking of the Malfoys…is there anything, I mean…can anything be done to help Draco?”

Snape stared at Harry as if he’d grown a second—or possibly a third—head. Harry, himself, was almost surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth.

“ _Help_ Draco?” Snape parroted after a moment, tone clearly disbelieving. Harry simply shrugged.

“It’s just…he had every chance to turn us over to You-Know-Who,” Harry explained after a moment. “Lucius…he was practically foaming at the mouth, trying to convince his son to identify me. I _know_ Draco recognized us, even with the Stinging Hex Hermione had cast on my face. But he refused to confirm who I was. He didn’t want to be responsible for my death.”

Snape blinked a few times as he listened the story, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. After a beat, he snorted out a sardonic laugh.

“And now you think that Draco, essentially, has a _good heart_ ,” he drawled after a moment, his tone leaving no question as to what he thought about the mere idea. Harry shrugged again.

“Well he’s certainly not a murderer,” Harry said seriously. “He’s just—he’s barely a month older than I am.”

Snape continued to fix Harry with a rather disbelieving look.

“This is war, Harry—you can’t save everyone,” Snape remarked dryly after a moment.

Harry didn’t miss the way that Snape used his given name—something he’d never heard the man do before. He wasn’t sure what it was—whether he was trying to come across as more trustworthy or simply to shut Harry up, Harry wasn’t certain. But Snape _was_ a spy; Harry was certain the other man had some sort of angle.

“That also doesn’t mean we need to sacrifice _everyone_ for the greater good,” Harry argued after a moment, giving Snape a serious look. “Some people _can_ be saved.”

Snape all but rolled his eyes at that.

“Are we not prepared to sacrifice _ourselves_ for the greater good?” he inquired after a beat, his tone incredibly critical. Harry frowned.

“Only if we have to,” he said after a moment, his tone serious. “There _is_ a chance we could both come out of this alive, Snape.”

At his words, Snape’s face contorted in an especially ugly way, as though he’d just put something rather unpleasant in his mouth. He gave Harry a penetrating look.

“I very much doubt that, Mr. Potter,” he remarked, his tone reminiscent of the one he had always used in the classroom. Snape changed the subject quickly, before Harry could even remark on his cynicism. “It’s very uncharacteristic of you to want to help a Slytherin.”

Harry did roll his eyes at that.

“We don’t have time for house rivalries,” he bit out harshly. “As you said, this is war. I think Draco’s been pressured into joining a cause he doesn’t believe in—I think a lot of the younger generation of Slytherin has been, by their parents. I know you can’t just reveal yourself as a spy—I know that’s too dangerous—but _surely_ something could be done to help them.”

Snape sighed deeply. “You’re asking the impossible of me, Potter,” he remarked after a moment, sounding resigned. “But I’ll see what I can do—for Draco, and for any of the other reluctant Slytherins.”

Harry couldn’t help but smile at that, at how easily Snape had given in. He didn’t know how he’d ever believed Snape to be a monster; it had always been clear that, at the very least, Snape cared for the members of his own House. He couldn’t believe that he’d once thought Snape as bad as Voldemort—worse, even, when Snape had been the present evil and Voldemort had still been some nebulous concept that he couldn’t truly comprehend.

“Thank you,” Harry said sincerely after a moment, and Snape just nodded brusquely in acknowledgement. “So while I’ve got you here, why don’t you work on teaching me your healing spell again?”

Snape shook his head to himself but pulled out his wand to demonstrate.


	9. 1 May 1998

Harry tried not to be worried when Snape didn’t make their meeting in April or their contingency meeting, but that was nearly impossible. He did, at least, have many things to distract him—planning to break into the most secure building in wizarding London took up a great deal of Harry’s time and energy, it turned out. It also helped that he had the Map, which assured him the ability to verify that Snape was, at least, still alive and moving around the castle. It became a nightly ritual, checking the Map every evening before he went to bed, to reassure himself of Snape’s continued survival.

He noticed a lot of other things while checking the Map, though—noticed that a particular group of Slytherin sixth and seventh years were spending an awful lot of time in Professor Slughorn’s office, and Draco Malfoy was included in that number. Theodore Nott, Tracey Davis, Abadinus Harper and Daphne Greengrass rounded out the whole of them. Harry wondered whether this was what Snape had done, somehow, to reach out to the sympathetic Slytherin students—and at the same time, he wondered if asking Snape to do so might not cost them very dearly. He’d been so filled with conviction when he’d asked Snape, but the chances that everything might go wrong seemed exponentially greater with every day that passed—and Harry still wasn’t as close to destroying the Horcruxes as he’d have liked.

Another thing Harry noticed on the Map was the quickly diminishing number of Gryffindor students; he hadn’t seen Ginny’s dot since the beginning of the Easter Holidays, but he desperately hoped that that simply meant that the Weasleys had seen enough sense not to send her back. Neville’s dot disappeared after the second week of April; Harry had been desperately fearful that his friend was dead until he’d seen Neville’s dot appear again briefly before disappearing. Harry was certain then that Neville and the remainder of the missing Gryffindors had found a way out of the castle or a place to hide out—and he hoped that that wasn’t wishful thinking on his part.

As time dragged on, nearly all the seventh-year Gryffindors—as well as about half of the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws—disappeared entirely from the Map. Harry hoped desperately that his hypothesis was correct, that Snape would not let the Carrows simply kill Hogwarts students.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione decided to enact their plan on the first day of May. It turned out that getting into Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault was relatively easy; retrieving the cup and getting out was not. Not after Griphook betrayed them and took the sword, at any rate.

With the Horcrux in their possession but no way to destroy it, with Voldemort having finally realized what they were up to, Harry knew that their only next move was to go to Hogwarts—where he was _sure_ they could find the remaining Horcrux. He tried to convince Ron and Hermione to simply Apparate to the Shrieking Shack and use the tunnel from there, but Hermione was too insistent that Snape knew about the passageway, that he would have it monitored.

Harry almost told Hermione and Ron about Snape then and there, but he had to admit that Hermione was probably correct; Snape probably _did_ have someone watching the passageway, and unless that person was Snape _himself_ (unlikely), then Snape’s allegiance would be useless to them.

Feeling the press of time, the threat that Voldemort might get to the castle in time to move the Horcrux, Harry quickly decided that they would simply Apparate to Hogsmeade under his Cloak and survey the situation from there. He felt like a fool for not asking Snape more questions about the defenses around the castle; he’d been too focused on what was going on _inside_ the castle and not focused enough on what was going on _around_ it.

Still, he knew there was no time to dwell on his misstep then; he had a new misstep to focus on when they realized that Hogsmeade had a curfew, when they were very nearly caught were it not for Dumbledore’s brother taking them in and helping to sneak them into the castle.

The sight of Neville coming through the passage behind Ariana Dumbledore’s portrait was a huge relief, to know that he hadn’t been wrong in hoping that the others weren’t dead. He hadn’t shared with Ron and Hermione what he’d noticed on the Map, not wanting to alarm them unnecessarily, and he was relieved to know that that decision had been the correct one.

In retrospect, he was uncertain how he hadn’t managed to guess that they were all hiding out in the Room of Requirement—after Malfoy had disappeared from the Map so many times the previous year of the same reason, Harry supposed that it should have been obvious to him as soon as he noticed Neville disappearing and mysteriously reappearing for brief periods of time.

Things moved quickly from there; Ravenclaw’s diadem seemed to be a reasonable guess for the next Horcrux, so Harry set off with Luna to go get a look at the statue of Ravenclaw wearing it, so he’d at least know what the thing looked like. It was a pretty slim lead, but it was all he had to go on—unless, of course, he could track down Snape, and find a way to ask the man if Voldemort had already contacted him, told him precisely what object he wanted Snape to keep safe.

As always, it seemed, things didn’t go quite as planned; they managed to incapacitate the Carrows and find McGonagall, and Harry found himself desperate to impress upon her the seriousness of the situation, the seriousness of the quest he was on, without telling her anything about what he was _actually_ doing.

“Time's running out, Voldemort's getting nearer, Professor, I'm acting on Dumbledore's orders, I must find what he wanted me to find! But we've got to get the students out while I'm searching the castle—it's me Voldemort wants, but he won't care about killing a few more or less, not now—” _not now he knows I'm attacking Horcruxes,_ Harry finished the sentence in his head, though he didn’t dare say the last bit out loud.

 “You're acting on Dumbledore's orders?” McGonagall asked, the mention of the late Headmaster seeming to suddenly bolster her conviction that, however foolish Harry’s actions in entering the castle might have seemed to her, he was doing the right thing.

“We shall secure the school against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named while you search for this—this object,” she said finally, her tone brimming with the strength that Harry had always admired in his Head of House.

 “Is that possible?”

 “I think so. We teachers are rather good at magic, you know,” she remarked with a raised eyebrow. There was something about her dry sarcasm that, for a moment, reminded Harry of Snape. “I am sure we will be able to hold him off for a while if we all put our best efforts into it. Of course, something will have to be done about Professor Snape—”

 “Let me—” Harry began, wanting desperately to explain to her the truth about Snape. Hiding it from McGonagall at that point seemed like a wasted effort when it was so obvious that things would soon be coming to a head, that Snape’s role as a spy would soon be coming to an end, one way or another. Harry wasn’t able to finish his thought, though; McGonagall was too caught up in her planning to listen to a word Harry was saying.

 “—and if Hogwarts is about to enter a state of siege, with the Dark Lord at the gates, it would indeed be advisable to take as many innocent people out of the way as possible. With the Floo Network under observation, and Apparition impossible within the grounds—”

Suddenly, Snape and his role seemed a less immediate concern. Snape could take care of himself; young, innocent Hogwarts students could not.

 “There's a way,” said Harry quickly, and he explained about the passageway leading into the Hog's Head. McGonagall seemed skeptical.

 “Potter, we're talking about hundreds of students—”

 “I know, Professor, but if Voldemort and the Death Eaters are concentrating on the school boundaries they won't be interested in anyone who's Disapparating out of Hog's Head,” Harry pointed out reasonably.

 “There's something in that,” she agreed. She pointed her wand at the Carrows, and a silver net fell upon their bound bodies, tied itself around them, and hoisted them into the air. “Come. We must alert the other Heads of House. You'd better put that Cloak back on.”

She marched toward the door with a sense of purpose, and Harry didn’t feel he had the time to argue. The conversation about Snape would have to wait.

Harry threw the Cloak back over himself and Luna and followed her as she cast thee Patronuses to notify the other Heads of House.

They hurried down a few more floors, trying to keep up with McGonagall’s quick pace, when Harry picked up on another set of footsteps joining theirs. He felt in the pouch at his neck for the Marauder’s Map, trying to figure out who was with them, but it only took a moment for McGonagall to notice the footsteps as well. She stopped abruptly and raised her wand.

“Who's there?”

 “It is I,” said a low voice, and from behind a suit of armor stepped Severus Snape.

Harry felt a moment of elation at the sight of Snape; there was no more need for subterfuge then, at least not in front of Luna and McGonagall. This was going to be the end—Harry was rapidly closing in on the final Horcruxes, and Snape’s help would be invaluable in finding the next one, and likely in evacuating the students.

Harry moved to pull off the Cloak, but Luna, seeming to sense what he was going to do, grasped his arm tightly to stop him. Harry opened his mouth to protest, but Luna cast a wordless Silencing Charm on him. It truly wasn’t fair, Harry thought at that moment, that Luna seemed to have grasped wordless spellcasting much better than Harry himself had, when he had been in his sixth year.

“Where are the Carrows?” Snape asked critically as he took a menacing step toward McGonagall.

“Wherever you told them to be, I expect, Severus,” she answered in a calm, measured tone. Harry struggled against Luna’s hold, trying to remove the Cloak; he knew that Luna was only trying to help, probably thought that he was so overcome with rage that he was trying to attack Snape—but in reality, she was being the perfect opposite of helpful. Snape’s eyes flicked in their direction quickly, as though he realized that they were there.

“I was under the impression that Alecto had apprehended an intruder.”

 “Really?” said Professor McGonagall with an air of purposeful nonchalance. “And what gave you that impression?”

 Snape flexed his left arm purposefully, the arm that held his Dark Mark. McGonagall made a rather disgusted face at the gesture.

 “Oh, but naturally,” she said spitefully. “You Death Eaters have your own private means of communication, I forgot.”

 Snape ignored the vitriol in her voice, eyes still roving over the area where Harry and Luna stood, invisible. Harry continued to struggle against Luna; her hold was surprisingly strong, as was her wordless Silencing Charm.

“I did not know that it was your night to patrol the corridors Minerva.”

 “You have some objection?”

 “I wonder what could have brought you out of our bed at this late hour?”

 “I thought I heard a disturbance,” said Professor McGonagall.

 “Really? But all seems calm.”

 Snape gazed into her eyes meaningfully

 “Have you seen Harry Potter, Minerva? Because if you have. I must insist—”

Hearing his name on Snape’s lips seemed to grant Harry some strange sense of power; he fought off Luna’s Silencing Charm and spoke meaningfully, just as McGonagall raised her wand ominously.

“Both of you, _stop_!” Harry hissed, loud enough for them to hear but conscious of the way that voices carried in the Hogwarts corridors. Surprisingly enough, they did, although McGonagall shot a concerned glance at the seemingly empty spot where Harry and Luna stood. Professors Flitwick and Sprout came running down the corridor, Slughorn trailing behind them, breathing heavily.

With a purposeful movement, Harry pulled off the Cloak; McGonagall gasped in disbelief at what he’d done, but Snape’s expression was silently understanding. He knew as well as Harry did that they were reaching the end of the whole farce.

“All of you, wands down!” Harry said, directing the words toward the newcomers as much as toward McGonagall. They all stared at him in disbelief as Harry looked around for somewhere they could go, somewhere less open. He spotted a door to an unused classroom a bit down the hall and motioned toward it. “Get inside, and no one curses anyone.”

Snape looked a little disgruntled, but he was the first to follow Harry’s order. McGonagall seemed totally floored by Snape’s actions, staring openmouthed after him. Harry followed Snape, dragging Luna behind him with a hand around her wrist, hoping the Heads of House would follow suit.

They did, and Harry quickly closed the door behind them, casting _Muffliato_ as soon as he did so. Snape shook his head to himself with a slight smirk, leaning against one of the desks with an air of nonchalance Harry knew he didn’t feel. McGonagall stared warily at Snape; the other three Heads of House kept glancing around the room, as though uncertain of how to interpret the situation.

Harry didn’t waste any time.

“We’re going to evacuate the younger students, and all the older students who want to leave, out of the castle through the Room of Requirement,” he announced to the room as a whole. McGonagall’s eyes widened comically, likely wondering why he would divulge their plan to the enemy.

“Harry—!” she began to protest, but Harry cut her off, turning to Snape.

“Can you keep Voldemort and the Death Eaters’ attention away from the seventh floor corridor, so we can get them all out?”

Snape pursed his lips thoughtfully.

“I can’t make any promises, Potter, but I’ll do my best,” he remarked finally. “The Dark Lord is unpredictable under normal circumstances, and this is anything but normal.”

McGonagall’s mouth dropped open, her hand flying to cover it. Harry wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw tears prickling in her eyes as it seemed to hit her what had just happened, what had been going on right beneath her nose.

“Severus,” she breathed out uncertainly. Professor Sprout looked startled, and Flitwick grim. Slughorn seemed just as flustered as always.

Snape didn’t acknowledge McGonagall’s utterance, wouldn’t even look in her direction; it was as though he couldn’t bear to meet her gaze. In the uncomfortable silence that cropped up, it was Luna who spoke first.

“I knew you weren’t one of them,” she said confidently after a moment, and Snape’s eyes snapped over to her quickly, as if he’d forgotten she was even in the room. “You don’t have Nufflumps gathering around you the way the Carrows do. They’re attracted to Dark Magic, you know.”

Snape blinked at her several times, as if trying to decide how to respond, before he seemed to decide to simply ignore her. Harry cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“We’ll gather all the students in the Great Hall,” Harry announced after a moment, since it seemed that McGonagall was still too shocked to take charge of the situation. “I think it goes without saying that none of you can speak of this—” he motioned abstractly in Snape’s direction.

“Understood,” Professor Flitwick said in a no-nonsense voice, still looking at Snape with a wary expression. Harry nodded sharply, his scar still aching.

“I need to talk to the Headmaster—alone,” he remarked after a moment, his tone leaving no room for argument.

“But Harry—” Professor Sprout began to protest, but Harry held up his hand.

“I’ve met with Professor Snape at least half a dozen times this past year, alone,” he told them all in a no-nonsense manner. “If he had wanted to kill me, he could have done it long before now.”

There was an awkward shuffle in the room, as all the Heads of House shifted on their feet but none of them made any move to leave the room. Harry reached out, offering his Cloak to Luna.

“Luna, you take this and let everyone know the plan.”

“Nonsense, Potter; _I_ will escort Ms. Lovegood,” Flitwick said after a moment, chest puffed out with pride. “You may need that Cloak.”

Harry wanted to argue, but he saw the wisdom in Flitwick’s suggestion and nodded. That seemed signal enough for everyone; Flitwick was the first to shuffle out of the room, with Luna in tow. Professors Sprout and Slughorn followed a moment later, but McGonagall lingered behind, uncertain.

“Severus,” she began again, awkwardly. Snape finally turned to glance at her, giving her a sharp look.

“Minerva, can you not _see_ that this is not the time for this conversation?” he hissed, his tone harsh. “This is war—well and truly war. Go gather your House. Consider that an order from the Headmaster, if you must.”

McGonagall looked properly chastised at the words, nodding sharply. She wiped an errant bit of wetness from her eye and turned, leaving the room without another word. Harry and Snape were finally alone.


	10. 1 May 1998

“That was quite the gamble you took there, Potter,” Snape remarked after a moment, his tone half-critical, half…almost admiring. Harry just shrugged.

“It was about to be four against one—you didn’t stand a chance,” he said seriously. “And I need to talk to you. He’s looking for something, an object in the castle somewhere, and I think it might be—”

“Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem, yes,” Snape finished, waving his hand dismissively. Harry felt a brief moment of triumph that he’d been correct.

“Did he let you know where it is?” he demanded impatiently after a moment. Snape gave him a long look.

“You’re not going to like this, Potter,” he remarked finally. “It’s in the Room of Hidden Things.”

Harry felt a moment of triumph before realizing what Snape meant. He felt his stomach sink.

“The Room of Requirement…I’ll have to wait until they finish evacuating students before I can get to it.”

Snape nodded sharply. “Precisely.”

Harry sank down onto one of the desks, running his hand through his hair in frustration.

“Can’t anything ever go smoothly?” he groused. Snape ignored him.

“Did you bring the sword?” he asked pointedly instead. Harry flushed red with shame at the memory of what had happened to Gryffindor’s sword, how Griphook had taken it from them.

“We lost the sword,” he admitted reluctantly after a moment. Snape looked at him disbelievingly.

“You _lost_ —how do you intend to destroy the diadem, then, once you’ve found it?”

Harry blinked, surprised by Snape’s words. “How—?” he began, but Snape cut him off before he could finish.

“Don’t insult my intelligence, Potter,” he hissed, his voice low. “How do you intend to destroy the Horcrux?”

Harry’s mouth felt dry; all this time, he’d thought that Snape hadn’t known what he was doing, that Dumbledore had kept it a secret. He forced himself to take a calming breath.

“How long have you known?”

Snape looked at Harry seriously for a long moment before he seemed to decide to answer. “I’ve suspected for a long while—even before Albus’ death. I became more certain when you asked for the sword, as I knew it was imbibed with basilisk venom.”

Harry stared at him disbelievingly; Snape really _was_ a good spy, because Harry hadn’t even suspected that he’d known what Harry was doing. Before he could recover from the shock, Snape was speaking again.

“There is something you must know, Potter—something I hesitated to tell you, on Albus’ orders,” Snape said finally after a moment, more uncomfortable than Harry had ever seen him.

“What is it?” Harry prodded after a moment, when Snape didn’t continue. Snape shifted uncomfortably before pointing at his own temple.

“See for yourself.”

It took Harry a moment to figure out what Snape was saying. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut, like all the air had been sucked out of his lungs.

“Are you sure?” he asked finally, certain he’d misunderstood. Snape sighed impatiently.

“Just do it, Potter.”

Hesitantly, Harry lifted his wand and said, “ _Legilimens_!”

Instantly, Harry knew he was in Snape’s mind; he felt Snape’s consciousness crowding around him in a way that was almost as uncomfortable as it was indescribable. He saw a little redheaded girl with green eyes, no more than nine or ten years old; it struck him, suddenly, that this must be his mother. Harry stared at her for a moment, transfixed, as she spoke in a soft, hesitant voice.

“Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?”

She sounded uncertain, looking at the boy standing beside her—clearly a younger version of Snape. He looked even uglier than he did as an adult, his nose seeming even more disproportionately large for his face, his clothing rumpled and worn and oversized, as if made for a grown man.

“No,” Snape said after a moment of hesitation. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

Harry felt a gentle nudge, and it became obvious that it was Snape, trying to ferry him along to the memory Snape wanted him to see. Harry didn’t fight him; Snape had willingly opened up his mind to Harry, which had been a measure of trust—of intimacy almost—that Harry wasn’t willing to break. Not again, not after all that had happened.

He followed Snape’s mental prodding, and another memory unfolded in front of him. It was strange being inside another person’s mind like this, different than viewing memories in a Pensieve; he could see, suddenly, how it took someone of great skill to be a good Legilimens, because without Snape guiding him along, Harry felt as though he might simply tumble into the recesses of Snape’s mind.

Harry’s mother appeared once again; this time, it was obvious that it was her. She must have been in her later years of Hogwarts, resembled more the photographs Harry had seen of her holding him as a baby. She was in a dressing gown, standing in front of the portrait of the Fat Lady. Snape stood in front of her looking particularly wrecked.

“I can’t pretend anymore,” Lily declared with an air of finality. “You’ve chosen your way; I’ve chosen mine.”

Snape gave him another mental push; this wasn’t what he was meant to be seeing either. Harry tried to follow the prodding, found himself standing beside Snape—a little older, obviously an adult, and Dumbledore. Snape looked almost crazed, more like a mental patient than the composed professor Harry knew.

“If she means so much to you,” said Dumbledore, “surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?”

 “I have—I have asked him—” Snape began desperately.

 “You disgust me,” said Dumbledore, and Harry wished he could take a step back, the vitriol in Dumbledore’s words so powerful that if he had been there physically, Harry was certain he’d be bowled over. He’d never heard that kind of contempt in Dumbledore’s voice; he felt, once more, how little he’d known the man.

Snape nudged him again, more insistently this time.

Harry found himself in Dumbledore’s office this time; Snape sat in the chair in front of his desk as Dumbledore walked around him, almost jittery.

“Harry must not know, not until the last moment, not until it is necessary, otherwise how could he have the strength to do what must be done?” Dumbledore gestured wildly, pacing as he spoke.

 “But what must he do?”

 “That is between Harry and me. Now listen closely, Severus. There will come a time—after my death—do not argue, do not interrupt! There will come a time when Lord Voldemort will seem to fear for the life of his snake.”

 “For Nagini?” Snape looked at Dumbledore as though he’d begun speaking a foreign language, and one that Snape didn’t know.

 “Precisely. If there comes a time when Lord Voldemort stops sending that snake forth to do his bidding, but keeps it safe beside him under magical protection, then, I think, it will be safe to tell Harry.”

Since Snape had made no attempt to move Harry along, Harry figured that he must have finally landed on the correct memory; he was apparently as terrible a Legilimens as he’d been an Occlumens, at the beginning.

 “Tell him what?”

 Dumbledore took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

 “Tell him that on the night Lord Voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast her own life between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsed building. Part of Lord Voldemort lives inside Harry, and it is that which gives him the power of speech with snakes, and a connection with Lord Voldemort’s mind that he has never understood. And while that fragment of soul, unmissed by Voldemort, remains attached to and protected by Harry, Lord Voldemort cannot die.”

Harry watched the scene in disbelief as it registered to him what Dumbledore was saying. That Harry himself had a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside of him. That Harry was another Horcrux.

“So the boy…the boy must die?” asked Snape quite calmly.

“And Voldemort himself must do it, Severus. That is essential.”

 Another long silence. Then Snape said, “I thought…all those years…that we were protecting him for her. For Lily.”

“We have protected him because it has been essential to teach him, to raise him, to let him try his strength,” said Dumbledore, his eyes shut tightly, as if trying to block even himself from the truth of what he was saying. “Meanwhile, the connection between them grows ever stronger, a parasitic growth. Sometimes I have thought he suspects it himself. If I know him, he will have arranged matters so that when he does set out to meet his death, it will truly mean the end of Voldemort.”

 Dumbledore opened his eyes. Snape looked positively horrified by his words.

 “You have kept him alive so that he can die at the right moment?” Snape didn’t seem willing to believe the words himself, even as he said them. The look that he gave Dumbledore then was something quite akin to disgust.

 “Don’t be shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?”

 “Lately, only those whom I could not save,” Snape said sharply, critically. He stood up. “You have used me.”

 “Meaning?”

 “I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter—”

 “But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”

Snape pushed Harry out of his mind, more gently than he had during their Occlumency lessons, but there was no doubt of what he was doing. Harry stumbled back against one of the desks, feeling it as a physical blow; he was breathing hard, his heart racing. As he looked up into Snape’s eyes, Snape looked almost guilty. Harry put a hand to his own chest, as if he could contain the frantic beating of his heart.

“I’m…I’m a Horcrux,” Harry said thickly after a moment, the words sounding foreign to him, as if they’d been spoken by someone else entirely. Snape frowned deeply.

“It seems that way, yes,” he acknowledged neutrally after a moment. Harry tried futilely to swallow the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat.

“That means…after we destroy the rest of the Horcruxes…I have to let Voldemort kill me.”

Snape sucked in a sharp breath.

“Yes,” he said finally.

Harry forced himself to take another deep breath, suddenly feeling a sense of calm overcome him. He finally knew how to finish this—he knew where all the remaining Horcruxes were, and he knew Voldemort would soon be coming for him. And if Harry were honest with himself, part of him had always known that it might end that way—that he might die at Voldemort’s hand. Knowing that the end was settled was almost a relief to him; knowing that his death would bring about Voldemort’s as well was enough to make it worth it.

Harry exhaled slowly.

“Okay,” he said finally. Snape stared at him disbelievingly.

“ _Okay_?” he parroted incredulously after a moment. “Albus raised you specifically so you could be killed when it was most convenient!”

But Harry’s new sense of inner calm didn’t waver, no matter how uncharacteristically distraught Snape seemed by the whole situation.

“And what should he have done?” Harry asked reasonably after a moment. “Killed me himself when I was a child to spare me the pain of this moment? At least he gave me a chance to live, to have friends, to learn magic—that’s more than Imight have had otherwise. I’ve known since I was eleven years old that Voldemort might come after me, that I might die at his hand. I’m ready for it.”

Harry’s calm words, paradoxically, seemed to enrage Snape even further.

“ _Ready_ for it? You’re seventeen years old! No one should be prepared to die at seventeen years old!” he hissed.

“Aren’t you prepared to die, if it’s necessary?” Harry breathed after a moment. Snape threw his hands up in frustration.

“That’s _different_ —” he began to protest, but Harry cut him off.

“Is it? Is it really?” he inquired sensibly after a moment. “Because you’ve lived more? Dumbledore and Voldemort have owned you since you were my age, Snape. You haven’t been able to live your own life at all.”

Harry was almost surprised as he said it, seemed to realize the truth of his words simultaneous to them leaving his mouth. Snape truly never _had_ been able to live, to be his own person; his poor choices in his youth had seen to that.

“Sacrificing _children_ is not what the Light is meant to be about,” Snape said cynically after a moment, although he didn’t contest Harry’s words. Harry shrugged.

“This is war, Severus,” he said, parroting Snape’s own words right back at him. “You can’t save everybody.”

The skin around Snape’s mouth stretched tight, as if he was clenching his teeth tightly. Harry took his silence as a cue to leave. He turned toward the door and stopped, glancing over his shoulder to look at Snape.

“Stay safe, Snape—just because I have to die doesn’t mean you do,” Harry remarked after a moment before letting himself out of the unused classroom and dashing back toward the Room of Requirement.


	11. 1 May 1998

Harry met up with the others in the Room of Requirement, many of its previous inhabitants as well as many of the newcomers having already headed to the Great Hall to help evacuate younger students or to other parts of the castle to work on its defense. He could have kissed Ron and Hermione when they came back with the mangled mess that was once Hufflepuff’s Cup and a handful of basilisk fangs; that meant that the final question of _how_ he would destroy the Horcruxes was at least solved.

Hermione and Ron seemed too distracted to question how he found out the location of the Horcrux, which was a bit of a blessing; even though he felt that he could finally explain to them about Snape’s role in everything, they didn’t have the time, not with Voldemort’s announcement that they would soon be attacking the castle unless Harry was turned over. Harry was fully prepared to turn himself in to Voldemort—but absolutely not until he’d found and destroyed Ravenclaw’s diadem.

Most frustrating was the fact that they had to wait until everyone was out of the Room of Requirement. When Neville’s grandmother told them with perfect certainty that she was the last one out and had sealed the tunnel behind her, Harry at long last stood in front of the wall and concentrated on the Room of Hidden Things.

He, Ron, and Hermione raced through the room, splitting up and searching for the diadem; the room was vast, too vast to find the thing easily. Harry had a vague recollection that he’d seen the diadem when he’d tossed Snape’s old Potions book in the room; the problem was that he didn’t remember precisely where he’d placed it.

Harry was so engrossed in his search that he didn’t notice the three figures appearing behind him.

“Stop right there, Potter.”

Harry swiveled around quickly, pulling his wand—Malfoy’s wand—out of his sleeve on instinct. He groaned at what he saw—Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle standing there in front of him, Crabbe and Goyle looking more menacing than usual. Malfoy stood behind the other two boys; Harry almost couldn’t see the slender boy past their bulk.

“That’s my wand you’re holding, Potter,” Malfoy pointed out after a moment, pointing the one he held through the gap between Crabbe and Goyle. He sounded almost petulant as he said it, and Harry suddenly wondered about the wisdom of asking Snape to help Malfoy. Perhaps he was more evil than he seemed.

 “Not anymore,” panted Harry. “Winners, keepers, Malfoy. Who’s lent you theirs?”

 “My mother,” said Draco.

 Harry laughed nervously, looking around. Ron and Hermione seemed to have run too far away to hear the confrontation, or he had no doubt that they would have joined him to even the odds.

“So how come you three aren’t with Voldemort?” asked Harry.

“We’re gonna be rewarded,” said Crabbe with a childlike glee. “We ‘ung back, Potter. We decided not to go. Decided to bring you to ‘im.”

“Good plan,” said Harry in mock admiration. It was then that he noticed the diadem, sitting crooked on top of a wig-wearing bust. He tried his best to hide his reaction to the sight.

“So how did you get in here?” he asked instead, trying to distract them.

“I virtually lived in the Room of Hidden Things all last year,” said Malfoy, sounding strangely wobbly and uncertain. “I know how to get in.”

“We was hiding in the corridor outside,” grunted Goyle with an air of proud self-importance. “We can do Diss-lusion Charms now! And then you turned up right in front of us and said you was looking for a die-dum! What’s a die-dum?”

Harry almost rolled his eyes.

“Harry?” came Ron’s voice suddenly, from the other side of the wall. “Are you talking to someone?”

Crabbe lifted his wand.

“ _Stupefy_! _Stupefy_!”

Harry jaw dropped as both Crabbe and Goyle fell to the floor, stunned. It took Harry a few long moments to realize that the person who had uttered the stunning charms was none other than Malfoy himself.

Harry stared at Malfoy, who was breathing heavily, as though he’d just run a marathon rather than cast two rather simple spells. He looked disbelievingly at his mother’s wand in his hand, almost appearing not to comprehend what he’d just done.

Ron and Hermione ran around the corner, skidding to a halt behind Malfoy. They both held their wands raised toward him, but Harry held up a hand to stop them from hexing Malfoy. His own wand remained raised.

“What are you playing at, Malfoy?” he asked suspiciously after a moment. Malfoy eyed him with an equal air of suspicion.

“I don’t want this any more than you do, Potter—I might not want to marry a Mudblood, but I don’t want to kill them. I don’t want to kill _anyone_ ,” Malfoy said, his voice nasally but seemingly sincere. He lowered his own wand, apparently in a show of good faith. “Slughorn approached me and some of the other Slytherin students. Pointed out that when the war is over, we might be able to argue a case of leniency for our families if we quietly switched sides.”

Harry raised his eyebrows at that; he wondered how Snape had managed to get Slughorn to do so without showing his hand. Slughorn had never been particularly brave _or_ principled, and he’d obviously been surprised when Snape’s true nature had been revealed not long before. But whatever had happened, it was obvious that Snape’s hands were all over this.

“What if Voldemort wins?” Harry asked practically. Malfoy shook his head.

“He’s gone off the rails, Potter—he isn’t making smart decisions,” he said, looking around the room nervously, as if afraid some other Death Eaters might be around the corner, listening. “Even if you don’t beat him now, he can’t last. He’ll sabotage himself.”

Harry snorted softly to himself. If Malfoy had any idea about the Hocruxes, he would likely be less convinced of Voldemort’s fallibility when left to his own devices.

“But why are you _here_ , Malfoy?” Harry asked after a moment, motioning down at Crabbe and Goyle. Malfoy looked uncertain at that, looked deeply uncomfortable when he finally found the words.

“I _want_ you to win, Potter—I want this to be over as much as you do,” he finally remarked, his confidence so obviously forced that it was almost laughable. “When they said they were going to stay behind, to bring you to the Dark Lord, I decided to stop them. Not that they could have managed it without me, the lumbering idiots.”

Harry almost laughed out loud to hear Malfoy talking about his supposed friends that way. Instead, he pointed his wand at Crabbe and Goyle and said, “ _Incarcerous_.”

Ropes tightened around both boys’ wrists and ankles, ensuring that they weren’t going anywhere. After that, he lowered his wand and stuck it in his sleeve; Draco watched the progress of the hawthorn wand with hooded eyes.

“Okay, Draco—I believe you,” he said after a moment, reaching over and grabbing the diadem off the statue’s head and motioning to Hermione and Ron to leave. They lowered their wands and followed him as he jogged away from Malfoy, toward the entrance of the room.

“But I’m keeping your wand!” Harry called over his shoulder. “Winners, keepers!”

The three of them raced out of the Room of Requirement and into the corridor, Harry stopping for a moment to observe the diadem. It had “ _Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure_ ” etched upon its surface; as Harry held it, he could feel the same malevolent energy he’d felt from the locket, from the cup. It was definitely a Horcrux.

“We need to destroy this,” Harry said, looking around for somewhere they could go, to do it unobserved. Snape already knew about the Horcruxes; they didn’t need anyone else finding out the truth about them. Harry knew why Dumbledore had wanted to keep them a secret; he didn’t want the allure of eternal life to encourage another dark wizard to make them.

Before he could find anywhere, Harry noticed sounds of yelling, the unmistakable bangs and explosions of dueling. Harry’s heart fell; they hadn’t been inside the room long, but while they had been there, Death Eaters seemed to have penetrated the castle. Fred and Percy both backed around the corner and into view, dueling two hooded Death Eaters.

Without a word, Harry, Ron, and Hermione all ran to help, wands raised. Spells flew in every direction, Harry dodging one as the man dueling Percy took a swift step back, his hood falling off.

“Hello, Minister!” bellowed Percy as he cast a jinx in Thicknesse’s direction. The spell seemed to hit its target; Thicknesse dropped his wand and started clawing frantically at the front of his robes. “Did I mention I’m resigning?”

“You’re joking, Perce!” Fred shouted in something like pleased disbelief, almost willing to acknowledge once again that Percy was his brother.

The Death Eater that Fred was dueling collapsed under the weight of three separate stunning spells as Thicknesse fell to the ground, tiny spikes erupting all over his body, puncturing the fabric of his robes.

“You actually are joking, Perce…I don’t think I’ve heard you joke since you were—”

Then the air exploded around them with a large _boom_.

Harry wasn’t sure what had happened for a moment; he felt himself flying back through the air, holding the diadem tightly in one hand and Draco’s wand in the other. Debris flew in every direction, dust clouding the corridor.

When he finally recovered enough to move, he was half-buried under a pile of stone that had once been the castle’s wall; a stickiness on the side of his face registered after a moment as blood.

Harry forced the rubble off of himself with a grunt and tried to stand, feeling unsteady on his feet. He braced himself on a large piece of stone for a moment before he was finally able to take a few steps. There he found Hermione, helping her to her feet as he looked around for Ron.

Harry located the Weasleys easily, their red hair distinctive even with a cloud of dust covering it. Ron and Percy were both kneeling on the floor beside someone’s body.

 “No—no—no!” someone was shouting. “No! Fred! No!”

And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them. Harry didn’t think; he shoved the diadem into Hermione’s hand and ran to Fred’s side, kneeling next to Ron.

Fred was bleeding copiously from both his head and his chest; he was still breathing, but his breaths were shallow and uneven. Barely realizing what he was doing, Harry held his wand out over Fred’s body, chanting the melodic, musical incantation of Snape’s spell.

He ran his wand slowly over Fred’s body, the entire world seeming to freeze around him as he did so. He heard nothing, saw nothing but Fred’s body as he started the incantation a second time, watching the wounds begin to clear slowly as he traced his wand over the source of the blood. He repeated the chant a third time and watched the gash in Fred’s head close entirely, the blood flooding through his robes from his chest wound seemed to have stopped as well. Fred’s breathing evened out a little.

After a long moment, Harry sat back, breathing hard. The spell was more draining than he’d expected, but then, he’d never performed it on as harsh a wound before. Three sets of eyes were staring at him in disbelief.

“Harry—what _was_ that?” Ron asked, gobsmacked.

“One of the Half-Blood Prince’s spells,” Harry said absently after a moment, trying to catch his breath. He looked at Percy meaningfully. “Get him to Madame Pomfrey _now_ —I stopped the bleeding, but he needs Blood-Replenishing Potion. And if he has any internal damage, I don’t know how to heal it. He needs a real Healer.”

Percy nodded, looking totally flustered as he levitated the remaining rubble off his brother’s body, conjured a stretcher and lifted him onto it. Ron looked for a moment as if he was going to follow before Hermione grabbed his arm tightly.

“Ron, no!” she said frantically, holding him back. “Percy can take care of Fred. We’re the only ones who can end this! We need to find a basilisk fang under the rubble, and we need to get the snake!”

Ron watched Percy levitate Fred’s stretcher around the corner before nodding sharply. All three of them dropped to their knees, moving bits of stone aside. They found two completely crushed fangs before Hermione finally found one that was mostly intact; without preamble, she took the fang in her hand and stabbed the diadem with it.

It let out a loud, inhuman scream before the metal began to warp and thick, bloodlike liquid began to ooze out. Harry felt a moment of relief; all that was left was the snake—and then, of course, Harry himself.

Hermione seemed equally ready to realize that they weren’t finished.

“You need to find out where Voldemort is, because he'll have the snake with him, won't he? Do it, Harry—look inside him!” she encouraged after a moment—and that was how Harry _knew_ the situation was dire, because Hermione had never, and would never have before, encouraged him to use his connection with Voldemort’s mind.

It was easier than he thought it might be, easier than going into Snape’s mind had been—but then, apparently, he had a little bit of Voldemort inside of him. In an instant, he was in a dilapidated but familiar little room; it took Harry a moment to realize that it was the Shrieking Shack.

He was rolling his wand between his fingers, watching it, his thoughts on the room in the castle, the secret room only he had ever found, the room, like the chamber, that you had to be clever and cunning and inquisitive to discover...he was confident that the boy would not find the diadem...although Dumbledore's puppet had come much farther than he ever expected...too far...

“My Lord,” said a voice, nervous and desperate. He turned to see Lucius Malfoy sitting in the darkest corner of he shack. One of his eyes remained swollen shut, a mark of the punishment he’d received after the boy’s last escape. Voldemort had refused to heal it; Lucius didn’t deserve that much, and he’d threatened the cowardly fool with worse punishment if Lucius tried to heal it himself.

 “My Lord...please...my son...”

“If your son is dead, Lucius, it is not my fault. He did not come and join me, like the rest of the Slytherins. Perhaps he has decided to befriend Harry Potter?”

“No—never,” whispered Malfoy.

“You must hope not.”

“Aren't—aren't you afraid, my Lord, that Potter might die at another hand but yours?” asked Malfoy, his voice shaking. “Wouldn't it be...forgive me...more prudent to call off this battle, enter the castle, and seek him y-yourself?”

“Do not pretend Lucius. You wish the battle to cease so that you can discover what has happened to your son. And I do not need to seek Potter. Before the night is out, Potter will have come to find me.”

Voldemort dropped his gaze once more to the wand in his fingers. It troubled him...and those things that troubled Lord Voldemort needed to be rearranged...

“Go and fetch Snape.”

“Snape, m-my Lord?”

“Snape. Now. I need him. There is a—service—I require from him. Go.”

Lucius stumbled over his own feet in his haste to get out of the room, to follow his Lord’s order. Voldemort smiled as he saw it, the fear and devotion he inspired in those who followed him.

"It is the only way, Nagini," he whispered, and he looked around, and there was the great thick snake, now suspended in midair, twisting gracefully within the enchanted, protected space he had made for her, a starry, transparent sphere somewhere between a glittering cage and a tank.

Harry forced himself out of Voldemort’s mind; he’d seen what he needed to see, and he wanted out, away from the sick feeling he got when he was inside Voldemort’s mind. It was different than being in Snape’s mind, oh yes. He’d been an observer in Snape’s mind, but when he was in Voldemort’s mind, he _was_ Voldemort—he felt what Voldemort felt, he wanted what Voldemort wanted. And whatever Voldemort had wanted with Snape, it had most certainly not been good. Harry swallowed past the thick feeling in his stomach.

“He's in the Shrieking Shack. The snake’s with him, it’s got some sort of magical protection around it. He's just sent Lucius Malfoy to find Snape.”

“Voldemort's sitting in the shrieking Shack?" Hermione exclaimed in outrage. "He’s not—he’s not even _fighting_?"

“He doesn't think he needs to fight,” said Harry. “He thinks I’m going to go to him.” And he was right.

“But why?”

“He knows I’m after Horcruxes—he’s keeping Nagini close beside him—obviously I’m going to have to go to him to get near the thing—”

“Right,” said Ron, squaring his shoulders. “So you can't go, that’s what he wants, what he’s expecting. You stay here and look after Hermione, and I’ll go and get it—”

Harry cut across Ron; this was the perfect opportunity to get away from them, to do what he had to do. It would be so much harder knowing Ron and Hermione would be there to witness his death.

“You two stay here, I’ll go under the Cloak and I’ll be back as soon as I—”

“No,” said Hermione, “It makes much more sense if I take the Cloak and—”

“Don't even think about it,” Ron snarled at her.

Before Hermione could get farther than “Ron, I'm just as capable—” the tapestry at the top of the staircase on which they stood was ripped open.

" _Potter_!” roared one of the Death Eaters who had come through the tapestry. And then they were fighting, and the conversation had to be tabled for a later time.


	12. 2 May 1998

Harry wriggled into the earthy passage hidden in the Whomping Willow’s roots. It felt much smaller than it had the last time that they’d entered it, but then, it was the same as it had been with Gryffindor’s sword. It wasn’t that the sword had gotten smaller—it was that Harry himself had grown. Harry couldn’t imagine how Snape, at over six feet in height, had managed to move through the tunnel to follow them four years prior. Harry was nowhere near six feet, but he still needed to crawl to make it down the tunnel.

Harry went first through the tunnel. He half-expected that they’d meet with Death Eaters at any moment, but Voldemort seemed unguarded; all of his Death Eaters had clearly been sent out into battle. Harry held his wand, illuminated, in front of him as he crawled on his knees and elbows until the tunnel finally began to slope upward, and Harry saw a sliver of light ahead of them. Hermione grasped his ankle.

“The Cloak!” she whipered. “Put on the Cloak!”

Harry groped for it in the tight space, but a moment later Hermione was shoving it into his hand. He managed to cover himself with it with considerable difficulty, extinguishing his wandlight with a murmured “ _Nox_.”

A few more feet forward, and he could hear the sound of voices from inside the room. He took a moment to feel thankful that someone had apparently blocked off the end of the tunnel with what appeared to be an old crate. Fighting to keep silent—even his breathing—Harry peered through the opening between the crate and the wall.

The room was as dark and dank as always, lit mostly by the large, enchanted sphere that housed Nagini. It swirled almost ethereally through the air, the snake encased safely inside it. Harry could see, just barely, a long-fingered white hand twirling a wand. The Elder Wand.

Harry was close enough now to make out the voices; his heart lurched when he heard Snape’s, just on the other side of the crate that blocked off the tunnel’s entrance.

“…my Lord, their resistance is crumbling—”

Harry had to hand it to the other man—he sounded every bit the simpering follower that Lucius Malfoy had, played his part perfectly. The sound of Snape speaking like that, so uncharacteristically deferential, his voice so devoid of its usual cool sarcasm, almost made Harry feel sick to his stomach. Something about the whole situation gave Harry a bad feeling.

“—and it is doing so without your help,” Voldemort said in a critical voice, not unlike the one someone would use to scold a wayward child. “Skilled wizard though you are, Severus, I do not think you will make much difference now. We are almost there...almost.”

“Let me go back to the battle, my Lord. There is no one who knows the minds, the dueling strategy of the other Hogwarts professors better than I.”

Voldemort stood up, and Harry was able to see him fully then, his grotesque, snakelike face, his sickly white pallor, his inhuman red eyes. He ignored Snape’s words fully, as if the other man hadn’t spoken at all.

“I have a problem, Severus,” he said instead, his voice low and cold.

“My Lord?” said Snape, obviously taken aback by the abrupt change of subject.

Voldemort raised the Elder Wand, holding it with the tips of his fingers, as if it were some sort of scientific specimen he was examining.

“Why doesn't it work for me, Severus?”

Voldemort sounded half-curious, half-petulant as he asked the question.

“My—my lord?” said Snape blankly. “I do not understand. You—you have performed extraordinary magic with that wand.”

Harry wasn’t certain if Snape truly _was_ frightened, or if he was playing at it for Voldemort’s sake. Harry knew, however, that _he_ was frightened; something about the whole situation didn’t sit right with Harry, even more so than usual when it came to Voldemort. Had he found out Snape’s secret? Had one of the Heads of House, or Luna, let it slip? Had Harry unknowingly doomed Snape to death?

“No,” said Voldemort sharply, as if condemning Snape for his lack of insight. “I have performed my usual magic. _I_ am extraordinary, but this wand…no. It has not revealed the wonders it has promised. I feel no difference between this wand and the one I procured from Ollivander all those years ago.”

Voldemort’s tone had turned from sharp to gently musing, but Harry’s scar was throbbing; he could feel the sense of fury that was building inside the dark wizard. Harry wanted to feel mollified, that Dumbledore had been correct that the Elder Wand wouldn’t work properly for Voldemort, but all he was able to feel was a mounting sense of terror—for Snape. Why had Dumbledore been so insistent Voldemort get the wand? What good did it do them? Harry couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything past the dark, red rage that was beginning to cloud his vision.

“No difference,” said Voldemort again, as if Snape hadn’t gotten the message the first time.

Snape remained silent; Harry’s heart was pounding so loud he was surprised that the two men in the next room couldn’t hear it from where they were standing. Harry wondered if Snape simply knew better than to further antagonize his master—or if Voldemort had simply left Snape, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words. Voldemort continued to speak, undaunted by Snape’s silence.

“I have thought long and hard, Severus...do you know why I have called you back from battle?”

Snape moved an inch forward, and Harry caught sight of him through the gap. His eyes were fixed upon Nagini, floating above them in its enchanted cage. Harry felt his breath catch; Snape knew about the Horcruxes, and he’d heard what Dumbledore had told the other man in his memories. Snape was an intelligent man; he had to suspect that the reason that Voldemort was protecting the snake was because Nagini, too, was a Horcrux. Was Snape eyeing the snake, plotting a way to kill it?

“No, my Lord, but I beg you will let me return. Let me do my part.”

“You overestimate your own worth, Severus. The battle will be won, and Potter will come to me. He will hate watching the others struck down around him, knowing that it is for him that it happens. He will want to stop it at any cost. He will come.”

Voldemort paused, swirling the Elder Wand between his fingers once more, delicately.

“But it is of you that I wished to speak, Severus, not Harry Potter. You have been very valuable to me. Very valuable.”

There was something in Voldemort’s low tone that was very obviously dangerous. Harry knew that Snape _had_ to sense it too.

“My Lord knows I seek only to serve him,” said Snape finally, his tone careful, measured. Voldemort, again, ignored Snape as though he hadn’t even spoken.

“My concern at the moment, Severus, is what will happen when I finally meet the boy.”

“My Lord, there can be no question, surely—?”

“—but there is a question, Severus. There is.”

Voldemort paused for a long, thoughtful moment before he spoke again.

“Why did both the wands I have used fail when directed at Harry Potter?”

“I—I cannot answer that, my Lord.”

“Can't you?”

Harry felt stab of pain through his scar; he forced his fist into his mouth and bit down hard, trying to stop himself from crying out in pain. He closed his eyes, and suddenly he couldn't help it; he was no longer watching from the gap between the crate and the wall, only half able to see what was going on. Instead, he _was_ Voldemort, looking into Snape’s pale face.

“My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter. Twice it failed. Ollivander told me under torture of the twin cores, told me to take another's wand. I did so, but Lucius’s wand shattered upon meeting Potter's.”

“I—I have no explanation, my Lord.”

Snape truly sounded scared, then, and he was eyeing the snake with a sense of obvious trepidation.

“I sought a third wand, Severus. The Elder Wand, the Wand of Destiny, the Deathstick. I took it from its previous master. I took it from the grave of Albus Dumbledore.”

Snape met his eyes, and when he did, they were full of uncertainty.

“All this long night when I am on the brink of victory, I have sat here," said Voldemort, his voice barely louder than a whisper, “wondering, wondering, why the Elder Wand refuses to be what it ought to be, refuses to perform as legend says it must perform for its rightful owner...and I think I have the answer.”

Snape still said nothing.

“Perhaps you already know it? You are a clever man, after all, Severus. You have been a good and faithful servant, and I regret what must happen.”

“My Lord—”

Harry felt an aching sense of trepidation again, so distinctly separate from what he felt as Voldemort that Harry _knew_ it was coming from inside of himself. Snape seemed to sense the danger as well, seemed to realize that Voldemort had realized himself not the master of the wand.

“The Elder Wand cannot serve me properly, Severus, because I am not its true master. The Elder Wand belongs to the wizard who killed its last owner. You killed Albus Dumbledore. While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot truly be mine.”

“My Lord!” Snape protested, raising his wand as he finally seemed to realize what Voldemort’s intentions were.

“It cannot be any other way,” said Voldemort. “I must master the wand, Severus. Master the wand, and I master Potter at last.”

And Voldemort swiped the air with the Elder Wand. For a moment, Harry thought that the wand had refused to do anything at all for him—and then Voldemort’s intentions became clear. Nagini’s cage hovered through the air, and before Snape could react, it encased him, head and shoulders, and Voldemort spoke in Parseltongue.

“ _Kill_.”

Snape’s eyes widened in fear as the snake lunged for him, fangs latching onto the first bit of open skin they saw—his neck. The sound Snape made was almost inhuman; the only time Harry had ever heard anyone else sound so pained was under the torture of the Cruciatus Curse. After a long moment, Snape fell to his knees.

“I regret it,” said Voldemort coldly, but there was no remorse in his tone as he turned away from Snape, as though he had already dismissed the man. In an almost offhand manner, he flicked his wand in the direction of his snake; its enchanted cage floated off of Snape, and Snape’s body fell to the floor with an undignified thud.

With a sharp shock, Harry found himself back inside his own body; he’d bitten his knuckles so hard trying not to scream that he’d drawn blood. Harry pulled his fist out of his mouth and glanced nervously between the crate and the wall; he could no longer see Voldemort. He lifted his wand toward the crate without thinking.

“Harry!” Hermione whispered frantically, but Harry had already begun to levitate the crate out of the way. He climbed up into the room without preamble; thankfully, Voldemort and the snake were both gone.

“Harry!” Hermione called again, frantically, but Harry ignored her, kneeling beside Snape with a sense of urgency. Snape’s eyes were still open, but blood was pouring out of the wound in his neck in deep, crimson rivulets, soaking into the dank floor of the shack. Without even thinking about it, Harry knew what to do; as he had with Fred, Harry began to trace his wands over the wound, whispering Snape’s healing spell in the same rhythmic tone Snape had taught him.

Finally, the bleeding stopped; Harry began the chant a second time, ignoring Ron and Hermione climbing up into the shack beside him.

A bit of the color had returned to Snape’s face, inasmuch as his face ever _had_ any color. Harry moved to start the spell a third time when Snape’s hand reached up and grasped around his wrist with a surprising amount of strength.

“D-don’t,” Snape’s voice was weak and raspy, almost inaudible, and Harry stared down at him, uncomprehending. But Snape was obviously starting to fade; his eyelids fluttered, as if he was fighting to stay conscious. He wouldn’t be providing any answers.

“There’ll be venom in the wounds!” Hermione exclaimed after a moment, beginning to tear away a piece of Snape’s robe. “It’ll be easier to extract it if the wounds aren’t closed!”

Harry wasn’t certain what Hermione was intending to do until she cast a Cleansing Charm on the torn piece of Snape’s robe—it was filthy, whether from the battle or lying on the floor of the shack, Harry wasn’t certain. Then, Hermione pressed the cloth to the wound on Snape’s neck, preventing the blood from welling up anew.

Leaving Hermione to it, Harry began feeling his way around the front of Snape’s robes, almost on autopilot.

“Come on, you paranoid bastard,” he murmured to himself, feeling around in the inner pockets of Snape’s robes. “You must have—yes!”

Harry let out an exclamation of relief when he felt familiar vials; he pulled out a collection of them, in varying colors and consistencies. For a moment, Harry felt himself totally at a loss, completely overwhelmed by the amount of potions the other man kept secreted in his robes. But he thought back to the potion Snape had given him after his own encounter with Nagini, and after a moment, he was able to select a pearlescent whitish one.

Harry unstoppered it quickly and reached his hand behind Snape’s head, tilting it up slightly. Snape’s eyelids fluttered open once more with a groan, still half-conscious.

“Sir, drink this,” Harry instructed, and Snape’s eyes focused for the briefest of seconds on the phial in Harry’s hand before his lips parted almost imperceptibly, and he managed to swallow the antivenin. One hand still cradling Snape’s head, Harry fumbled for the rusty, red-colored potion he knew was a Blood-Replenishing Potion. He was struck with a problem immediately, though; with one hand still cushioning Snape’s head, he didn’t have a free hand to unstopper the bottle.

“Here,” Ron said, reaching over Harry’s shoulder and pulling out the stopper. Harry felt a rush of gratefulness for his friends; when it became clear what he was trying to do, both Ron and Hermione had aided him without question, and that meant the world to Harry.

When Harry turned back to Snape, his eyes had fallen closed once more, and Harry felt a brief moment of panic.

“Snape— _Snape_!” he hissed harshly, trying to get the other man’s attention. Snape’s eyes finally fluttered open, more slowly this time than the last. Harry felt his heart thundering in his chest. “Come on, Snape, one more potion.”

Snape’s eyes fluttered closed.

“…tired,” he said after a moment, voice barely more than a whisper, and Harry felt his heart break.

“I know you are,” he said sympathetically. “Just swallow this, come on…”

Harry put the vial to Snape’s lips, and Snape did swallow it, coughing slightly as he did, although he managed to get most of the potion down. Hermione had used a spell to affix the piece of Snape’s robe to his neck to ensure the bleeding didn’t begin anew. Gingerly, Harry lowered Snape’s head back to the ground and turned back to his two friends.

“I need you to do something for me,” he said seriously to both of them, glancing sideways at Snape to make sure that the man was still breathing. “I need you to get Snape to Madam Pomfrey—and I need you guys, both of you, to make sure that he gets there safely.”

“Harry—” Hermione began to protest, but Harry cut her off.

“No,” he said seriously, his voice sharp. “If we win this war, we owe our victory to _him_ more than anyone else. Who do you think gave me the sword? Who do you think told me about the Taboo? Who do you think passed me the information about where the diadem was hidden? Taught me the spell I used to save Fred’s life? It was all _him_ , and without him, we might not be here right now. This all…it means nothing if he dies. _Nothing_.”

As Harry said the words, he felt the truth in them. He knew that he needed to sacrifice his own life in order to kill Voldemort; if the man who had helped him the whole way through also perished, Harry couldn’t help but feel that all was lost. Snape’s life _mattered_ ; if Harry couldn’t save himself, he could at least save Snape.

“Okay, Harry,” Hermione said after a moment, her eyes distinctly wet. “We’ll keep him safe.”

Ron, for his part, was looking down at Snape’s prone body, then back up at Harry, as if he was just seeing them both for the first time. He didn’t contest Hermione’s assertion, though. Harry breathed a sigh of relief.

“What about you, Harry?” Hermione finally asked. Harry pursed his lips, the full reality of what he needed to do finally hitting him. This would be the last time he saw his friends; this would be the only chance he had to say goodbye. At the same time, he knew that he couldn’t; if Ron and Hermione got even an _inkling_ of what was about to happen, they’d never leave his side to take Snape to the infirmary. He was skirting a very thin line; he knew that he couldn’t outright lie, but by the same token, he certainly couldn’t tell his friends the truth.

“You know what I have to do, Hermione,” Harry said after a moment, evasively. “I have to go to him.”

Hermione’s hand flew to her mouth; she was obviously fighting back tears.

“No, Harry—please, wait. We can come up with a plan—” she began haltingly. Harry shook his head.

“I already _have_ a plan, Hermione—Dumbledore told me _exactly_ what I need to do to finish this,” Harry said—and that, at least, was not a lie. A misleading half-truth at best. Harry looked at both of them, Ron tight-lipped and silent and Hermione nearly bubbling over with palpable apprehension. Harry took a deep breath.

“But if I don’t come back—”

“No!” Ron protested hotly. “Don't say that!”

Harry ignored him.

“If I don’t come back,” he began again, “you know what you need to do. Finish off Nagini, and then Voldemort will be mortal again. And Snape…make sure he doesn’t go to Azkaban. He’s been with us all along—he doesn’t deserve that.”

Hermione nodded tearfully, seeming to accept the situation; Harry had known that appealing to her sense of justice would likely yield the results he wanted. Ron, on the other hand, remained adamant.

“We want to help you, Harry,” he argued determinedly, but Harry shook his head vehemently.

“You can help me by helping _him_ ,” Harry said seriously, gesturing down at Snape. “Don’t let him die.”

Hermione was the first to move, nodding sharply as she stepped forward and conjured a stretcher.


	13. 2 May 1998

Harry and Voldemort stood across from each other in the Great Hall, wands aimed at each other. Voldemort’s eyes were narrowed to angry red slits as Harry spoke.

“Snape was Dumbledore’s spy from the moment you threatened my mother, and he’s been working against you ever since! Dumbledore was already dying when Snape finished him!”

“It matters not!” shrieked Voldemort, who had followed every word with rapt attention, but now let out a cackle of mad laughter. “It matters not whether Snape was mine or Dumbledore’s, or what petty obstacles they tried to put in my path! I crushed them as I crushed your mother, Snape's supposed great love! Oh, but it all makes sense, Potter, and in ways that you do not understand!

“Dumbledore was trying to keep the Elder Wand from me! He intended that Snape should be the true master of the wand! But I got there ahead of you, little boy—I reached the wand before you could get your hands on it, I understood the truth before you caught up. I killed Severus Snape three hours ago, and the Elder Wand, the Deathstick, the Wand of Destiny is truly mine! Dumbledore's last plan went wrong, Harry Potter!”

Harry couldn’t help it; a small smile broke out onto his face.

“You’re right,” Harry admitted after a moment, eyebrow raised. “Dumbledore’s last plan didn’t go precisely as he intended,” he admitted, his tone low and even. “But neither did yours. Severus Snape lives.”

For the first time, something that looked like fear came into Voldemort’s eyes, but he covered it quickly.

“Impossible!” he insisted. Harry just shrugged; it did him no good to try to convince Voldemort of Snape’s continued survival. It was like arguing with an overlarge, irrational child.

Harry looked at the Elder Wand in Voldemort’s hand, at Draco’s wand in his own; suddenly, Dumbledore’s plan, his certainty that Voldemort should come to possess the Elder Wand, made sense to Harry. In one, earth-shattering moment, everything seemed to fall into place—the way he survived Voldemort’s second Killing Curse, and the way he was going to survive at that moment.

“Dumbledore’s last plan hasn’t backfired on me at all. It’s backfired on you, Riddle.”

Harry waited a beat, but surprisingly, Voldemort didn’t speak; he seemed uncharacteristically uncertain as he stared across the Great Hall at Harry.

“Even if you _had_ managed to kill Snape, it wouldn’t matter. The wand would never work for you the way you wish. Severus Snape was never the true master of the Elder Wand. He never defeated Dumbledore.”

“He killed—!”

“Aren’t you listening? _Snape never beat Dumbledore_! Dumbledore’s death was planned between them! Dumbledore intended to die, undefeated, the wand’s last true master! If all had gone as planned, the wand’s power would have died with him, because it had never been won from him!”

 “But then, Potter, Dumbledore as good as gave me the wand!” Voldemort’s insisted, although he suddenly sounded much less sure of himself. “I stole the wand from its last master’s tomb! I removed it against the last master’s wishes! Its power is mine!”

“You still don’t get it, Riddle, do you? Possessing the wand isn’t enough! Holding it, using it, doesn’t make it really yours. Didn’t you listen to Ollivander? The wand chooses the wizard…the Elder Wand recognized a new master before Dumbledore died, someone who never even laid a hand on it. The new master removed the wand from Dumbledore against his will, never realizing exactly what he had done, or that the world’s most dangerous wand had given him its allegiance…”

Voldemort was breathing heavily, his eyes gleaming with barely-contained rage.

 “The true master of the Elder Wand was Draco Malfoy.”

 Blank shock showed in Voldemort’s face for a moment, but then it was gone.

 “But what does it matter?” he said softly. “Even if you are right, Potter, it makes no difference to you and me. You no longer have the phoenix wand: We duel on skill alone…and after I have killed you, I can attend to Draco Malfoy…”

 “But you’re too late,” said Harry, feeling a bizarre sense of glee as the truth of his own words hit him. “You’ve missed your chance. I got there first. I overpowered Draco weeks ago. I took his wand from him.”

 Harry held up Draco’s hawthorn wand as though to prove his point, and he could feel all the eyes in the Great Hall gravitating toward it.

 “So it all comes down to this, doesn’t it?” whispered Harry. “Does the wand in your hand know its last master was Disarmed? Because if it does… _I_ am the true master of the Elder Wand.”

The first reddish glow of sunrise began to show in the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall. There was a sense of desperation in Voldemort—desperation to believe that he wasn’t wrong, that Harry wasn’t right. Desperation to believe that he could, and would, still win this battle. Voldemort raised the Elder Wand, and Harry raised Draco’s in the same second.

“ _Avada Kedavra_!”

“ _Expelliarmus!_ ”

The sound of the two spells meeting echoed through the air like a canon blast. Harry saw, as if in slow motion, as the Elder Wand flew through the air, flipping to point toward Voldemort as it recognized its true master. The jet of green light rebounded as Harry caught the Elder Wand in his hand with a Seeker’s skill. And Voldemort’s body fell limply to the ground.

A thick, heavy silence seemed to fall through the Great Hall as the shock of the moment seemed to hit everyone—and just as suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, the room was filled with cheers and roars of jubilation. As if through a fog, Harry felt dozens of hands touching him; Ron and Hermione were both there with a strange immediacy, arms wrapped around him.

And suddenly, a thought struck him. He turned to Ron and Hermione, shouting over the chorus of cheers.

“Where’s Snape?” he demanded, and Ron and Hermione exchanged a look.

“In the Hospital Wing!” Ron shouted back after a moment, trying to be heard over the cacophony of sound in the Great Hall. Harry’s eyes widened.

“You left him _alone_?” he demanded in disbelief. “Do you know how many people want to kill him, on _both_ sides?”

Without another word, Harry broke free of all the hands hugging him and patting his back; he pushed his way through the throng, to several obvious exclamations of surprise. But Harry ignored him, forcing his way past people until he was out of the Great Hall at last. He began to run the familiar path toward the Hospital Wing, feeling that his feet couldn’t possibly take him fast enough.

“Harry, wait!”

It was Hermione’s breathless voice behind him, but Harry ignored it; he had a single-minded determination to find Snape, to make sure that he was all right. Harry wasn’t sure when the thought of Snape’s survival had become so all-encompassing—simply knew that the sight of the snake attacking him had chilled Harry straight to the bone.

Harry pushed through the doors to the infirmary, skidding to a halt inside of them—and it was pure chaos in there, people running around frantically as they tried to tend to dozens of injured. Madam Pomfrey was huddled over a boy Harry didn’t quite recognize but he thought might be a Ravenclaw, casting rapid-fire spells over his body; it looked as though his organs were moments from spilling out of a grotesquely large hole in his abdomen. Hannah Abbott was across the room, blood smeared across her face as though she’d tried to push back her hair with a bloody hand and not noticed, spreading salve onto a cut across another student’s forehead.

Draco Malfoy stood over an unconscious Blaise Zabini, chanting rhythmically over his body. Narcissa Malfoy, of all people, was administering a potion to Fred Weasley, who was pale and sweaty and semi-conscious but obviously _alive_ , Lucius standing behind his wife with a distinct look of someone who didn’t know if he was supposed to be there. George Weasley already sat beside his twin’s bed, the fully healed but still mangled earless side of his head in stark relief against his red hair.

Harry dashed through the chaos, searching for Snape; he felt a moment of deep alarm when he couldn’t find the other man, but after a desperate minute of searching, he managed to find Snape in a curtained-off area by himself, obviously Madam Pomfrey’s attempt to keep him out of sight.

Harry closed the curtain behind himself and slipped into the chair in the cramped area beside Snape’s bed; it was obvious how much they’d had to sacrifice space, the Hospital Wing being far over its capacity. Snape was paler than usual, which Harry would have once thought impossible; Hermione’s makeshift bandage had been removed from the side of Snape’s neck, replaced by a glowing blue sphere, not unlike the one that had held Nagini, at least in appearance. This one was small, though, barely larger than Harry’s fist—and it was shot through by little rivers of blood, which seemed to be cycling out of Snape’s body through the puncture wounds, then back in through a third, small hole that seemed to have been deliberately pierced into his neck for this purpose.

Snape’s breathing was slow and even, not ragged and labored like before. Had it not been for the glowing sphere that seemed to be cycling Snape’s blood and the unhealthy pallor of his skin, Harry would have almost believed that the man was merely sleeping.

Harry squeezed Snape’s hand, not having even realized that he’d taken it into his own.

“We won,” he whispered softly, although he doubted very much that the unconscious man could hear him. “We won, and we’re both still alive.”

Snape didn’t react, but then, Harry hadn’t expected him to; he merely slept on, an almost pained look on his face as he did. A moment later, Hermione pulled open the curtain and stepped inside it; it was no small feat, fitting two people in the cramped, curtained-off area around Snape’s bed. She closed it behind herself quickly.

“They’re moving some of the more seriously injured to St. Mungo’s,” she told Harry after a moment, her tone serious. Harry looked up, alarmed.

“We can’t let them move him,” Harry insisted. “St. Mungo’s isn’t safe for him.”

Hermione frowned. “And Hogwarts _is_?” she demanded disbelievingly after a moment. “He terrorized the students here.”

Harry glared at her.

“He did what he had to,” he bit out after a moment. “He protected the students as best as he could, without giving away his position. Imagine if the Carrows had had free run of the place.”

Hermione looked torn.

“I believe you, Harry—but not everyone will,” she remarked after a moment. “Not everyone will take your word for it.”

Harry swallowed thickly, feeling the truth in Hermione’s words. He knew that they still had a long road ahead of them—convincing everyone of Snape’s innocence would be a long battle.

“Then we’ll get the people who do, and we’ll set up a round-the-clock guard on him, until he’s well enough to defend _himself_ ,” Harry said seriously. “Hermione, we’d all be _dead_ without him. We owe him this.”

Hermione opened her mouth to respond, but then the curtain opened again, and Ron and George pushed their way inside. Ron had to press himself tightly against Hermione to fit all four of them inside the curtain; neither of them seemed to mind.

“Sign me up,” George said with conviction. “He taught you the spell that saved Fred’s life, so we’re even in my book. I won’t even slice off his ear, promise!”

“Me too,” said Ron after a moment. “He may be a bad-tempered bastard, but I know where we could have been without his help.”

A slow smile spread across Hermione’s face, as if she was warmed by Ron’s compassion; she reached around and grasped Ron’s hand, squeezing it tightly. Harry, too, felt encouraged by his friends’ support.

“Thanks, guys,” he said after a moment, his tone serious. “I know this is asking a lot of you.”

“Me in particular!” George pointed out with a wink to show that he wasn’t serious. “He cut off my ear!”

They all laughed softly, which had obviously been George’s intention. The battle had finally been won, though doubtlessly there was more work to do. Tending to the injured, holding funerals for the dead—Harry thought of Tonks and Remus with a pang of sadness. Capturing the remaining Death Eaters, exonerating Snape. Yes, there was still much to be done, but for the moment, at least, George was reminding them that they could relax.

“Merlin…imagine Snape’s face if he wakes up with a Weasley next to his bed,” Ron remarked after a moment, his face contorted into an expression of half humor, half disgust. Harry couldn’t help but laugh at the mental image that Ron’s words created.

“He’d probably think he woke up in Hell,” Harry remarked, looking down at Snape’s still pale face.

There was a low murmur of agreement through the group, all of them still smiling slightly. Harry, however, couldn’t wait to see Snape’s face when he woke up, couldn’t wait to gloat to the other man that they’d both survived, despite Snape’s direst predictions.


	14. June 1998

Snape didn’t wake up.

May melted slowly into June; each day seemed to drag on, the pain and suffering seeming to have no end in sight. Harry had lost count of how many funerals he’d attended; at least fifty people on their side had died in the Battle of Hogwarts, and it seemed that Harry was expected to attend every single funeral. He’d given at least a dozen speeches and press conferences; he wouldn’t have given as many, but several of them had allowed him to stress Snape’s contribution to the war and Dumbledore’s complicity in his own death, and that alone seemed reason enough to give in.

Kingsley became Minister and issued Snape an official pardon, but public opinion about Snape still seemed to be mixed. On the one hand, it seemed almost good that Snape had been injured, that he remained unconscious; it garnered a certain amount sympathy for him that Snape, awake and snarking, would never have been able to garner himself. It quickly became politically incorrect to refer to Snape as anything but a hero, but Harry knew enough to know that what people were willing to say in public and what they said behind closed doors were two distinctly different things.

Renovations of the castle had already begun; McGonagall, who had been appointed Headmistress without much fanfare, was hoping that the renovations would be finished in time to reopen the school in the fall. But giant sections of the walls had been blown away, including the one that had nearly killed Fred Weasley. The top of the Astronomy Tower had been blown clean off—and good riddance for it, Harry thought. He’d been adamant that when they rebuilt it, they should change the layout of the uppermost floor; he never wanted to go in there again and remember Dumbledore begging Snape to kill him.

The first Death Eater trials were set to begin in August; several Death Eaters, including Lucius Malfoy, had made deals to give evidence on other Death Eaters in exchange for reduced sentences. Lucius sat in Azkaban, now blissfully free of dementors, his sentence only five years, while Draco and Narcissa sat at home under house arrest for the next year, though Draco would be allowed to return to Hogwarts for an intensive, N.E.W.T. preparation course they were offering for students who had been able to complete a good portion of their seventh year. Harry had spoken on both of their behalf when they had made their deals to testify against others; they’d both saved his life when they had had no obligation to do so, and Harry had no doubt that his public show of support for the two Malfoys was a big reason for their rather lenient sentences.

Harry felt like he was living a half life; bouncing between funerals, press conferences and Hogwarts renovations during the day, he spent most nights curled up in the chair beside Snape’s bedside, waiting hopefully for the other man to wake up. The enchanted sphere of light beside Snape’s neck was gone; between the antivenin potions he’d been given and the careful filtering of his blood for the first several days, Madam Pomfrey was certain all the venom had been removed from Snape’s bloodstream. The wound on his neck had been closed and dittany applied, but there were still two large, raised scars where Nagini’s fangs had punctured Snape’s skin.

There was no explanation as to why Snape wasn’t waking up—one Healer had posed that it was the stress the initial blood loss had put upon his body while another suggested that the venom, before they’d managed to flush it all out, had done long-term damage. Yet a third Healer had suggested that perhaps the head wound he’d suffered when he’d fallen to the floor of the Shrieking Shack had done him permanent brain damage. They’d all been able to agree on one thing, though—the longer Snape went without waking up, the less of a chance there was that he ever _would_.

The procession of witches and wizards willing to guard Snape’s sickbed was larger than Harry might have expected—it cycled between nearly all of the Weasleys (save Fred, who was still recuperating himself), all the Heads of House, and several other Hogwarts professors. Harry spent the occasional night at the Burrow, when he could no longer stand to sleep in the chair beside Snape’s bed (which he’d once or twice transfigured into a cot of his own), but mostly his life was a blur of funeral-Snape-press conference-Snape-renovation-Snape-sentencing-Snape.

It was one night in early June when it seemed that Ginny had finally had enough. Harry was sitting beside Snape’s bed, reading out loud some nonsense from a Potions journal that was obviously far above his level of comprehension when she came through the door to the hospital room. The curtain beside Snape’s bed was half open, and she slipped inside it wordlessly.

“Come back to the Burrow, Harry,” Ginny pleaded softly, standing in the makeshift room that had been curtained off. “You can’t stay here every night; it’s not good for you.”

Harry stared at Ginny blankly, her words barely seeming to make sense to him.

“I can’t just leave him,” said Harry plaintively.

“Why _not_?” Ginny demanded impatiently. “He’s _unconscious_ , Harry—he doesn’t even know you’re here.”

“You don’t know that,” Harry argued determinedly. He stared at Ginny for a long time, as if hoping his determination about Snape would somehow seep into her. “He saved all our _lives,_ Ginny.”

Ginny sighed, crossing her arms across her chest in obvious annoyance.

“Okay, fine; he saved all our lives,” she conceded, her tone full of exasperation. “But he saved them so we could _live_ , not so you could spend the rest of your life wasting away by his bedside.”

Despite his determination, Harry did find himself musing over Ginny’s words, considering them seriously. She wasn’t wrong; Snape’s sacrifices meant nothing if he squandered the life the other man had worked so hard to save. But on the other hand, the mere _idea_ of abandoning Snape—even an unconscious Snape—brought a physical pain to his chest. He gave Ginny a helpless look.

“I _can’t_ , Ginny,” he said again, his voice filled with a quiet air of pleading. Ginny’s expression of exasperation slowly morphed into one of hurt.

“What about _us_ , Harry?” she demanded, hands on her hips, eyes sparkling with wetness. Harry blinked.

“What _about_ us?” he parroted finally, his tone totally uncomprehending. The look Ginny gave him in return was filled with disbelief.

“Just forget it, Harry Potter!” she exclaimed finally, totally flustered. She turned away from him, storming purposefully through the door and out of the infirmary. Harry blinked again, staring after her in confusion. After a moment, he looked down at Snape’s prone form once more.

“I’m not sure what just happened,” he confessed to the unconscious man, looking into Snape’s face as though expecting some kind of response. Of course, Snape didn’t react in the slightest. But still, Harry could almost imagine what Snape’s reaction _would_ be, were he conscious; he could almost hear Snape calling him a dunderhead or an imbecile, and Harry felt himself, paradoxically, smiling at the thought.

There was something he _did_ get out of Ginny’s words, though; they forced him to question his unflinching determination to remain at Snape’s beside. Ginny was correct about one thing—Snape wouldn’t _want_ him to be there, waiting beside his sickbed. No, Harry was not there for Snape, that much was clear. He was there for _himself_.

And Harry suddenly found himself forced to confront the question of _why_.

The confrontation with Ginny did another thing, of course, and that was to make Ron unquestionably angry.

“I don’t understand why you can’t just spend a few nights a week at the Burrow, mate!” Ron told him in no uncertain terms later that same day. “I don't understand why you need to spend _every_ night here.”

And the rub was that Harry didn’t understand why either.

It was later that week that McGonagall called him into her office—which was to say, Dumbledore and Snape’s old office. It bore a more McGonagall-ish look than it had the last time Harry had visited—there was something strangely severe about it, then, with less of the doodads that Dumbledore had always had lying around. Still, though, the place wasn’t unwelcoming.

“Mr. Potter,” she prefaced, after offering him a cup of tea. “I’ve called you here to discuss the continuation of your schooling. There are quite a few students returning to complete the time that they missed last year, and I’m sure you already know that we’ve been making special arrangements for those who completed only part of the school year last year. Ms. Granger has already approached me with an interest in completing her seventh year. It is my sincerest hope that you and Mr. Weasley would consider joining her.”

Harry hadn’t considered it much at all, up until that point. School seemed a distant non-concern, after all the deaths and funerals and upcoming trials. The prospect of whether or not he’d be taking Advanced Transfiguration N.E.W.T.s was the last thing on his mind.

“To be honest, I hadn’t much thought about it,” Harry admitted to her. And rather than consider the potential for his future, Harry found that his first concern was whether or not he’d be allowed to continue visiting Snape after the summer was over.

McGonagall cleared her throat meaningfully.

“I think your presence here would go a long way to persuade any students who may be skeptical about returning,” she remarked after a moment, gazing at him over the rims of her glasses. That was one thing about McGonagall that Harry had always appreciated: she didn’t beat around the bush.

Harry finally took a moment to consider the prospect. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his time, once the work on the castle was completed. Another year of schooling would give him time to settle, time to figure out where he wanted to go. He wasn’t certain he wanted to be an Auror anymore—and even if he did, he’d never completed the required N.E.W.T.s. It had the added benefit of keeping him close to Snape, too, giving him the ability to watch over the man.

“I’ll come back,” Harry acquiesced after a moment—and he wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw McGonagall’s shoulders relax a little, as though she hadn’t been sure of his answer.

“I think that’s a good decision,” she said levelly, the corners of her mouth turning up into the barest of smiles. “The only other question is, of course, what courses you will be taking. I presume you’re still serious about becoming an Auror?”

And there was the question, the one that was suddenly plaguing Harry. People thought, even more now, that he had some special skill in battling dark wizards, despite Harry’s protestations that he’d had a lot of help along the way. But Harry knew the truth; he had quick reflexes, but most of what had kept him alive and allowed him to kill Voldemort had been good luck and a great deal of good advice.

With proper training as an Auror, presumably, he’d learn more useful skills in that department, learn to defeat dark wizards on skill rather than dumb luck. The question was whether he even _wanted_ to anymore.

And then, as though his brain had stopped controlling his mouth entirely, he suddenly found himself speaking.

“I think I want to become a Healer.”

McGonagall seemed surprised by the words; after a moment, though, Harry was no longer shocked by his sudden, unexpected utterance. The more he thought about it, the more the words rang true. Healing magic had allowed him to save Snape and Fred both, but what he suspected in the deep recesses of his mind was that if he’d had better knowledge of healing spells, he might have been able to do more.

Fred had made a full recovery because he’d gotten to the Hospital Wing soon enough for Madame Pomfrey to help him—but Harry couldn’t help but wonder if he’d known more healing magic he’d have been able to help Snape more. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been able to do more sooner if Snape would be awake already.

“A Healer?” McGonagall echoed, as though she wasn’t quite certain she’d heard Harry correctly. “You’ve never shown any interest in the subject before.”

Harry pursed his lips thoughtfully.

“You’re right,” he acknowledged slowly. “But I should have. Did you know I got bitten by Nagini last year? And we had no idea what to do besides put dittany on it. If Snape hadn’t healed me, I might be dead now, and Voldemort might still be alive. I don’t want to fight anymore. I want to fix things.”

McGonagall’s gaze was piercing, seeming to look right through him. After a long minute, she pursed her lips and spoke.

“You’re not going to be able to heal Severus this way,” she said after a moment, her tone quiet but no-nonsense. “He’s been seen by the best Healers in the British Isles, and they’ve done all they can.”

Harry bit his lip. He hadn’t truly been thinking that he’d begin to learn healing magic and five minutes later have learned how to make Snape wake up. But he’d be lying to himself if he said he didn’t hope he’d be able to find _something_ to help the other man. He lowered his eyes.

“It’s just not _fair_ ,” Harry protested for a moment, petulantly. “It’s not fair that he gave so much—as much as I did, maybe more—and I’m here and he’s…”

Harry trailed off, unable to finish his sentence.

McGonagall surprised him by reaching across her desk, taking his hand in hers. Her fingers were long and spindly—and as Harry looked down at them, he noticed that it was there that McGonagall most showed her age. She wasn’t as old as Dumbledore—nowhere near—but she certainly wasn’t a young woman.

“I know,” she agreed sadly, squeezing Harry’s hand in her own.


	15. July 1998

June ambled into July, and renovations and repairs on the castle continued. Harry spent less time doing that and more time called into the Auror offices nearly daily, asked to give information about this Death Eater or that as they prepared the case against each of them. Harry found himself less useful than the Aurors assumed he would be; he’d spent the majority of the previous year camping out, and though he had personal knowledge of or encounters with _some_ of the Death Eaters, most he knew only by name—or not at all.

Harry made a conscious effort not to sleep beside Snape’s bed _every_ night; if Ginny’s words had done nothing, they had reminded him that Snape wouldn’t want that. He had, however, asked Headmistress McGonagall if she would be willing to let him stay in a room in the castle. Seeming to understand, she’d given him leave to use a set of rooms not a five-minute walk from the Hospital Wing, for which Harry was truly grateful.

The first thing he’d done when he’d started sleeping in the new rooms was look up a spell to allow him to continue to monitor Snape from afar. He’d considered asking Hermione for her help, but decided against it; his friends were beginning to become suspicious of his preoccupation with Snape and the man’s condition. It was difficult to explain to them why he refused to abandon Snape; they hadn’t been through what he’d been through with the man.

The first spell he found was one witches and wizards used, it seemed, to monitor babies; he’d discounted that one immediately, though, as it was a spell cast directly on the person intended to be monitored, and with all the magic that had already been cast on Snape, he wanted to avoid possible interactions.

He ended up using, it seemed, a similar spell to the one that his father and Sirius had used to enchant the two-way mirror Sirius given him years before. He kept one mirror beside his bed and another propped up next to Snape’s. Harry found, though, that it was necessary to track down another spell to augment the sound; the first two nights, Harry had woken up any time Madame Pomfrey or anyone else had gone in to check on Severus.

The other thing that Harry began doing in July was writing letters. He figured he’d written three dozen of them by the time his birthday rolled around that year.

One thing McGonagall had said to him during their meeting about his future schooling had stuck with him. That Snape had been seen by the best Healers in the British Isles and that no one had been able to pinpoint the cause of his continued comatose state, nor cure it.

So Harry’s first thought was to appeal to the healers _outside_ of Britain.

He started by asking Madame Pomfrey if she had any contacts on the continent. She gave him a few names, and he started writing. Writing to them to see if they knew of anyone who could consult on Snape’s case. Then writing those people.

Three different healers from mainland Europe had come to look over Snape—with McGonagall’s tentative permission and a multi-wizard escort protecting Snape every time. None of them had had any input, but they had given suggestions of others who might. Harry had written more letters, then—to America, to China, to Africa. He’d gotten a stream of treatment suggestions and even _more_ referrals, all of which he’d run past Madame Pomfrey.

Some of the suggestions Madame Pomfrey had deemed safe had been implemented. Slughorn returned and brewed potions. Flitwick returned and cast charms.

And still, Snape did not wake up.

And thus, Harry stood in the Owlrey one late July morning, holding a letter in his hand—a letter for a healer in Morocco.

“There you are, Harry!” Hermione exclaimed, as she came around the corner into the Owlrey. Only paying half a mind to Hermione, he glanced around the room for a suitable owl.  “I’ve been looking for you all morning!”

Harry turned his head to survey Hermione as she walked in.

“Why?” he asked after a moment, distractedly searching for an owl. He spotted one perched high, one that he had used before.

“Why?” Hermione repeated incredulously after a moment. “Harry, it’s your birthday!”

Harry stopped for a moment, owl resting on his arm, visibly startled by the news. He hadn’t even realized that it was his birthday.

“Oh,” he exhaled softly in surprise. He’d spent all the years after receiving his Hogwarts letter looking forward to his birthday—because it usually meant that he would soon be able to go to the Burrow, or that he was only a month away from returning to Hogwarts. That year—even when he was no longer with his relatives who would ignore his birthday—he, himself, had completely forgotten. He’d been more concerned with his quest to find a way to help Snape.

What Harry was thinking must have shown on his face, because Hermione’s face fell a little.

“You forgot,” she remarked after a moment, shaking her head. “You forgot that it was your birthday.”

Harry shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “I’ve been busy,” he said finally, attaching the letter to the owl’s leg and telling it where it was going. Hermione sighed audibly.

“Harry, I understand that you want to help Professor Snape. I understand that he helped us win the war, that he sacrificed a lot for this cause. I understand that you feel indebted to him,” she said slowly as the owl flew away, both of them watching it grow smaller in the distance. “But….don’t you think you might be taking this a little bit too far?”

“Too far?” Harry echoed slowly. “Snape is still unconscious. Maybe I’m not taking it far enough.”

Hermione sighed again.

“It’s not your responsibility to fix everything, Harry,” Hermione said, with the air of someone who was tired of repeating herself.

Harry turned away, throwing his hands up in a huff.

“I _know_ I can’t fix everything, Hermione!” Harry exclaimed, exasperated. “I’m not _trying_ to fix everything. I’m just trying to fix _him_.”

“At what expense, Harry?” Hermione demanded, obviously dismayed. “It’s as though the entire world revolves completely around him for you. You barely spend time with your friends, you’ve completely lost your relationship with Ginny—”

“I don’t _care_ ,” Harry said with a shrug. “I can’t _be_ with Ginny, Hermione. Too much has happened. I know she dealt with things too, but she hasn’t been through what I’ve been through. She doesn’t know what it was like.”

“And who does, Harry? Snape?”

Harry shrugged, giving Hermione a meaningful glance. Because it was true—only Snape knew what it was like to go through the year fighting for every bit of information about how to destroy Voldemort and his Horcruxes, about lying to everybody…

“Oh Merlin,” Hermione intoned softly after a moment, her voice barely more than a whisper. “No wonder you don’t want to be with Ginny. You’re in love with him. With Professor Snape.”

Harry stared at Hermione for a long moment, barely able to comprehend her words. “Snape” and “love” didn’t even seem to be words that should be uttered in the same _paragraph_ , let alone the same sentence. The idea of Severus Snape being involved in _anything_ that even resembled love was foreign and bizarre. Except—he’d admitted to loving Harry’s mother, even if it hadn’t turned out to be in a romantic way. Snape and love were not, as concepts, entirely incompatible.

And that made everything much, much stranger.

The fact that the first objection in Harry’s mind had been Snape’s seeming incompatibility with the idea of love—and not with the fact that Snape was male or Snape was _Snape_ —spoke volumes. Harry couldn’t remember ever consciously being attracted to another man, but the idea certainly didn’t disgust him. He had simply thought he felt an affinity toward Snape, idolized the man similar to the way he had once idolized Cedric Diggory—

“Oh Merlin,” Harry exhaled in disbelief. Had he had a crush on Cedric Diggory, too, and simply never realized it?

“Oh Merlin is right, Harry!” Hermione exclaimed, flailing her hands nonsensically, as if she couldn’t quite figure out what to do with them. “You’re in love with a man twenty years your senior who is currently unconscious. Oh my—does he…return your feelings, Harry? I mean, when you met up in secret were you—?”

Harry’s eyes widened when he realized what Hermione was implying.

“What? No! We never—I didn’t realize I fancied Snape until now!”

“Didn’t realize…? Oh Harry, how could you not _realize_?” Hermione echoed, her voice dripping with disbelief.

Harry shrugged agitatedly.

“It’s Snape!” he exclaimed wildly. “Why in the world would anyone be so crazy as to fancy _Snape_?”

Hermione smiled softly, her face taking a slightly dreamy expression. “Oh, I don’t know,” she remarked vaguely. “An older man with a dark side but who is ultimately virtuous and willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good? Who is intelligent and skilled and powerful? You’re right, Harry, I can’t imagine why _anyone_ would find themselves attracted to _that_.”

Harry stared at Hermione blankly, as if she had suddenly grown a second head.

“Wait—what?” he spluttered, starting at his friend in disbelief. “But you and Ron—”

Hermione shook her head with an indulgent smile.

“I’m not saying I fancy Snape,” Hermione explained softly. “I’m only saying that I can see why someone would. He’s not the ogre we thought he was when we were eleven years old.”

Harry turned around, staring outside at the sky and thinking about what Hermione had said. _Was_ he in love with Snape? It seemed both ridiculous and plausible at the same time, and Harry couldn’t seem to sort out his own feelings.  He shook his head to himself.

“What do I _do_ , Hermione?” Harry dejectedly inquired. After a moment of standing there, Harry felt Hermione’s hand on his shoulder.

“You keep moving forward, Harry,” Hermione said seriously, squeezing Harry’s shoulders. “I think it’s commendable that you’re trying to find a way to help Snape, but you can’t let that take over your entire life. If he wakes up…you want to be someone he can be proud of. And if he doesn’t—Harry, I’m serious about that—if he doesn’t, you’ll need to have a life of your own. One without him.”

Harry closed his eyes tightly, fighting against an uncomfortable feeling in his chest. He couldn’t deny that the notion of never being able to talk to Snape again was a crushing thought, one that he didn’t want to come to terms with. It was obvious, at that moment, that Hermione was right. He was in love with Severus Snape.

“What in Merlin’s name have I gotten myself into?” Harry asked to no one in particular, sighing deeply to himself.


	16. August 1998

The day that everything changed dawned as an entirely ordinary day. Harry had spent the afternoon prior with the other students who were at Hogwarts to help with the reconstruction of the castle along with most of the teachers—with less than a month until the first of September, everyone was scrambling to get the castle into mostly-acceptable shape before the rest of the students arrived. The castle seemed, in some way, to sense their goal, because everything they tried seemed to be working—sometimes better than they had even imagined.

He had had dinner in the Great Hall with many of the teachers—none of the other students were remaining in the castle, most of them seeming to prefer to spend time with their families or friends, anyone who had managed to survive the carnage of the war. Strange as Harry was, however, he rather preferred to spend time with his unconscious former professor.

Either way, Harry saw the Weasleys often enough; the whole collection of them were in and out of Hogwarts to help with this and that. Even Fred, now recovered enough, found time to visit the castle at least once a week with his twin.

After dinner, Harry visited with Snape for a while, watching the man sleep and reading incomprehensible nonsense from a potions journal—although it did seem slightly less like nonsense every day. Some bits of it had even started to make sense, if in a hazy and incomplete sort of way. It was only when Harry was starting to nod off in the chair beside Snape’s bed that he retired to his own chambers and went to bed.

It wasn’t uncommon for Harry to dream about Snape—especially not in the week following his conversation with Hermione. Most of his dreams, since then, had featured a variety of scenes with Snape—and many of them involved the two of them being in bed in some capacity. Some of them were simpler, though—just sitting on a sofa next to Snape, both of them reading a book, or Snape brewing while Harry played a game of Exploding Snap with himself.

Usually in those dreams, there was one defining feature, though. The Snape that appeared in Harry’s dreams was usually much…happier than the Snape he’d known, so much more full of life, free as he was from his life of spying.

But the dream Harry had that night had none of the usual features of his usual dreams about Snape. This Snape standing over his bed was not delightfully carefree, was not _in_ the bed with Harry but rather beside it, hovering ominously over it. His face looked grim, lined and so very pale.

“Is he dead, Potter?” Snape asked in a raspy whisper—and then he promptly collapsed to the floor.

Harry Potter sat up in bed with a start when he realized, suddenly, that what he was experiencing was not a dream at all. He threw the sheets off of his body and leapt out of bed—and yes, there was Snape’s prone body next to the side of his bed. Harry was overwhelmed by how helpless he felt then, for a moment, wishing he’d already begun training as a Healer. Wishing he had some idea of what to do, how to help Snape, how to even check if he was okay.

But the fact of the matter was that he _didn’t_ know any diagnostic spells, _still_. Cursing to himself, he turned Snape over onto his back and rested his hand on the man’s chest, relieved when he felt a familiar rise and fall of Snape’s breathing. Bolstered on by that fact, Harry reached back toward the nightstand.

“ _Accio_ wand,” he whispered—and it landed in his hand right away. Of all the things that Harry had managed to learn, wandlessly summoning his own wand had been one of the more useful ones.

He held his hand out in front of him, collecting a happy memory—and the first one that came to mind, strangely, was the moment that he found the potions in Snape’s robes in the Shrieking Shack, the moment he knew the man was alive and he had the power to help save him.

“ _Expecto Patronum_.”

And the familiar stag came galloping out of the end of Harry’s wand. Harry sighed in slight relief as the stag came to stand before him, seeming to realize that there were no Dementors in sight.

“Go find Madame Pomfrey and let her know that Severus Snape has woken up and is my room. Tell her to come immediately.”

The stag galloped away as Harry finished conveying his message, and Harry immediately turned his attention back to Snape. He spelled the lights on so he could observe Snape more clearly.

Snape looked, for all intents and purposes, as though he were simply sleeping on the floor, without a care in the world. Were it not for the fact that he was so pale—even paler than usual for the man—and that he was wearing the ill-fitting smock of a robe they had provided him in the Hospital Wing, Harry would almost be able to believe that Severus Snape—former Potions Master and Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy—had simply decided to take a nap on his bedroom floor.

Snape looked, as far as Harry could tell, as though he had not been harmed in any further way. It seemed Snape had simply woken up in the Hospital Wing, somehow figured out where Harry’s new quarters were and calmly walked over to ask him a question. Harry shook his head to himself.

“Stubborn git,” he murmured under his breath. Even newly conscious, Snape’s number one concern had been whether or not Voldemort had been defeated, whether or not his years-long mission had been a success. Harry wasn’t certain if that made him sad or proud.

Harry gently cast a _Mobilicorpus_ and levitated Snape onto the bed; there was no reason, after all, that Snape should remain uncomfortably on the floor when there was a bed directly next to him. Snape did not wake at the movement; he simply slept on, completely unperturbed.

Madame Pomfrey appeared in a housecoat and a rather frilly bonnet not a minute after Harry had gotten Snape settled into the bed. She wasted no time, immediately moving to examine Snape. After a few silent minutes, during which Harry let the Healer work with only her _hmmms_ and _ahhhs_ to break the quiet, Madame Pomfrey turned to him.

“I can’t possibly explain what occurred here, Mr. Potter,” she admitted after a moment. “It appears that he briefly regained consciousness and then, perhaps, simply passed out. His mind and his magic are both more alert than they have been. My best conjecture is that he may wake again in the next few hours, but I can’t say anything for certain. I can bring him back to the Hospital Wing.”

Harry felt a pang of desperation at the words.

“Is there any reason to move him?” he pressed after a moment, not wanting to let Snape out of his sight again. Snape had woken briefly, and his one objective had been to find Harry and get answers about the end of Voldemort. Harry wanted to be there the moment Snape woke again to give him the answers he was seeking.

Madame Pomfrey gave Harry an indulgent smile.

“I don’t see any reason he can’t stay here, if you’re willing to give up your bed for him. That said, if you notice anything odd about his condition, I do request that you summon me immediately.”

Harry nodded determinedly, and Madame Pomfrey seemed to decide to let the two of them be. And that was how Harry ended up spending the rest of the night in his armchair while Severus Snape, totally unawares, slept on in his bed.

“This wasn’t quite how I imagined getting you in my bed, Sir,” Harry said, smiling a self-deprecating smile as he tucked Snape into bed. Harry, instead, selected an armchair in the corner. The chair had been there when McGonagall had first granted him the rooms; Harry hadn’t bothered to change anything, lacking both the time and the dedication to do so.

It was an indeterminate amount of time later that Harry woke up in the arm chair, a twinge in his neck as his head snapped up suddenly. Harry’s wand was in his hand mere milliseconds later; he wasn’t certain what had woken him, but his wartime instincts were still, undoubtedly intact.

It only took a moment for Harry to pinpoint that had roused him—when he turned his head and noticed a familiar figure standing on the other side of the room, meticulously buttoning up the sleeves of his familiar black robes. Harry felt his heart stop for a moment, wondering if he was hallucinating—but no, there was Severus Snape, standing there in his quarters as though nothing peculiar had happened, buttoning up the sleeves of his robe.

“Snape?” Harry finally managed to choke out, and Snape turned slowly to face Harry, looking quite like himself, if only a bit paler than usual. The slight dampness of Snape’s hair seemed to indicate that not only had Snape woken—as though he hadn’t been totally comatose for months—but he’d actually managed to _bathe_ , and all without waking up Harry.

Snape released a very put-upon sigh.

“Yes, Mr. Potter?” he asked, with the same sort of bored disdain he’d likely use to address a brainless question in the classroom. Harry blinked, barely able to believe what was in front of him.

“You’re awake,” he intoned dumbly.

“You’re wearing glasses,” Snape rejoined without a pause, rolling his eyes when Harry gave him a strange look. “Oh, I’m sorry—I thought we were making obvious statements.”

Harry couldn’t help but continue to stare at the man, a war of emotions squirming through him. It was almost as though Snape had never been attacked, never been comatose at all. His wit—and in fact his temperament—seemed entirely intact. Harry took a deep breath, finally lowering his wand as he tried to steady himself.

“What are you doing?” he asked finally, once he was able to get enough of a handle on himself to say something that wasn’t sure to get him mocked by Snape. Perhaps.

“I think that should be quite clear, Potter,” Snape drawled with unmistakable impatience—before he sighed and seemed to resign himself to the conversation they were about to have. “A delightful house-elf named Winky went to my quarters to fetch some clothing for me while I bathed.”

Harry pursed his lips, still bothered by the fact that all of this happened while he slept on unawares. He was lucky that it _wasn’t_ wartime; Harry would likely be dead if it was, allowing all that commotion to go on around him without even the slightest stir.

“Were you planning on going somewhere…Sir?” Harry tacked on hastily at the end, feeling a bit adrift. The camaraderie that they had somehow managed to forge thorough their months of meetings….it wasn’t _gone_ , precisely, but Harry wasn’t sure where they stood.

“As I have been informed by the same house-elf that the Dark Lord has perished and the war is over, I planned to return to my home,” Snape said, his tone low and emotionless. “Or am I to be arrested?”

“No!” Harry insisted harshly before pausing, realizing that he shouldn’t speak so hastily—certainly not to someone as calculated as Snape. Snape didn’t need platitudes; Snape needed truth.

“Well…maybe not,” Harry amended finally. “I’ve been lobbying pretty seriously for you, but I’m not certain everyone is convinced. You may want to…stick around Hogwarts for a bit, at least until we’re sure. I can push the Auror Department to question you here—especially if we can manage to convince them that you’re too ill to travel. I’d be wary to allow them to question you at their offices. It’d be too easy for them to take advantage of the situation.”

Snape looked at Harry appraisingly, then, seeming impressed by his ability to assess the situation. Part of Harry was surprised too—but then, Snape’s paranoia had rubbed off on Harry in a pretty serious way. Snape took a deep breath and nodded, seeming to resign himself.

“Provided that Minverva is willing to allow me to stay, I will remain in the castle for the time being,” he said slowly. “I do presume that she is in charge these days.”

Harry nodded.

“I hate to point this out, but you should also stay and let Madame Pomfrey examine you,” he remarked cautiously after a moment. “I don’t know if Winky informed you, but it’s _August_. You’ve been comatose for over three months.”

Snape’s expression turned annoyed—not unlike his expression when Neville had ruined a cauldron in class.

“Fine, I will allow her to examine me,” Snape said with a begrudging sort of acceptance. And Harry finally released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding; Snape was awake and alive—and hopefully, Madame Pomfrey would tell them both that Snape was also _okay_.


	17. September 1998

After Snape woke in August, things went almost unbelievably well. Not only did Madame Pomfrey give Snape a clean bill of health—much to her own confusion—he agreed to stay at the castle until the beginning of term. Harry decided to make the overture—he _invited_ the Aurors to come interview Snape at the castle, pleading that the man had just woken from a coma and wasn’t up to a full interrogation at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

The tactic seemed to work, and Snape’s answers seemed to placate any further questions that they had. Harry listened to the interrogation through his enchanted mirror, which he had insisted Snape bring with him—and it was once again clear to Harry how Snape had made such a convincing spy. Harry had no doubt that the things that Snape was saying were the truth—but he was also an expert at spinning things in the most favorable light possible. It was nothing short of sheer brilliance.

It also didn’t hurt that Harry and Dumbledore’s portrait both corroborated Snape’s account of things. Aurors came to question Snape four separate times in three weeks, but by the end of it, they declared publicly that there was insufficient evidence to charge Snape with any serious wrongdoing. It wasn’t a blanket statement of Snape’s innocence, and Harry had gotten the feeling that more than one of the Aurors would have liked to revisit the issue. But it was, on the whole, not the worst possible outcome. Not when, in the same week, both Yaxley and Mulciber were handed life sentences in Azkaban.

Harry visited with Snape every so often during August; the man had returned to his old quarters and kept mostly to himself, not an entirely unexpected move. Harry wasn’t certain what Snape was doing during the hours of the day when he disappeared into his rooms—perhaps developing potions, perhaps planning his future…or perhaps even furiously pleasuring himself to remind himself that he was alive. Harry did acknowledge, however, that that last one was likely a fantasy conjured by his overactive imagination.

Visiting with Snape took on an entirely new tone then; before, the two of them had been preoccupied by war and death and the prospect of getting caught, and Harry hadn’t had time to worry about much else. He’d found himself worried about Snape’s welfare during the war, but with peacetime and the new freedom that granted him, Harry found himself having a whole field of new things to worry about. Was he simply a bother to Snape? Could Snape tell that Harry had feelings for him? Could Snape ever reciprocate those feelings, or would he be disgusted by the mere idea?

Snape had seemed to care about him—in some obtuse way—during the war, but since he had woken from his coma, Snape was different. He was, perhaps, slightly less hostile than he had once been, but he had also become quieter, more introspective. Rather than insulting Harry when he said something stupid, Snape often went quiet for long stretches, not listening to what Harry was saying at all. The one thing that hadn’t changed was that Snape was completely inscrutable.

And then, the day before term began, Snape left without much preamble—back to his home, which he apparently _had_ , away from Hogwarts. It seemed strange to think of Snape living somewhere that wasn’t the dungeons, but apparently that was precisely what he was doing. Harry had no idea what his former professor meant to do with his life from that point forward; he’d made it very clear that he had no intention of taking back his position as Headmaster (which the Board of Governors would likely not go along with in any case), nor was he interested in teaching Potions or Defense. In fact, he seemed eager to get away from Hogwarts entirely—and Harry certainly didn’t blame him.

Harry had known Snape would be leaving Hogwarts once the business with the Aurors was over with, but the realization that Snape was actually _gone_ left Harry somewhat adrift. In one way or another, a good portion of Harry’s life had revolved around Snape for a very long time, and the idea of moving forward without that seemed disturbing to him.

Luckily for Harry, the start of classes brought a whole slew of distractions, and for an entire week, Harry managed to forget about Severus Snape—almost. During the day, he scarcely thought about Snape at all in between classes and meals and studying.

It was, Harry realized very quickly, a monumental task that Hogwarts was taking on that year. Many of the Muggleborn students had not returned to Hogwarts the previous year—or had returned briefly and been swiftly imprisoned—which meant that all of them were a year behind their half- and pureblood former peers. This created a certain level of strife; in the first week alone, three fights broke out between those who had essentially been pushed back a year and their former peers who had been able to move on. Harry understood that, understood the kind of resentment that could build up at the feeling that one had been left behind.

If it had only been that, it would have already been a monumental challenge. But there were still more students who had completed part of the year, since many parents had pulled their children out of school when things had started to seem too dangerous. The added problem was that many of the children had been pulled out at entirely different times, which meant that coordinating makeups and remedial classes for those students was obviously a nightmare. Harry had heard about some of that from Ginny, who had missed only the very end of her sixth year. Ginny had, begrudgingly, begun speaking to Harry again after term started—and, perhaps less begrudgingly, immediately started dating Dean Thomas once more.

Having classes with Ginny and Luna was bizarre; he was so used to the former groupings of his classes, but everything was different then. The students who had completed most of their seventh year, like Draco Malfoy and Neville Longbottom, had entirely separate classes preparing for a special, one-time December N.E.W.T. administration. That left Harry sharing classes with Ron, Hermione, Muggleborns of his year—like Dean Thomas—and students who he’d previously thought of as being a year behind him, like Ginny and Luna.

On top of that, McGonagall had taken Harry’s stated interest in becoming a Healer to heart, and she’d helped Harry schedule time with Madame Pomfrey twice a week. In just the first week, Harry had already learned loads—diagnostic spells, how to heal different kinds of wounds and how to treat allergic reactions. Dedicating extra time to learning with Madame Pomfrey was probably good for Harry, too—Hermione and Ron were still prefects, and McGonagall had the prefects helping both broker disagreements between students and aid with the remedial courses they were giving some students in order to catch them up to speed.

Harry’s head was swimming with all that was going on during the day—but still, during the night before he dropped off to sleep, Harry found the time to think about Snape, to wonder what he was doing. He didn’t miss constantly wondering if Snape was going to be caught, but he did miss their semi-monthly meetings. He missed simply being able to see Snape, to speak to him. Hermione had certainly been right; he had feelings for Snape, and they were overwhelming.

It only took a week before Harry finally cracked. After nights of torturing himself over what to do about the situation, Harry finally settled upon writing Snape a letter. Perhaps he couldn’t _see_ Snape, but he could at least write the other man. There was a certain intellectual stimulation that Snape provided him that no one else could rival—not even Hermione, as intelligent as she was. Talking with Snape seemed to set Harry’s mind abuzz—and if he couldn’t have the real thing, he decided he’d have to settle on letters.

And that was how Harry found himself sitting at a desk in the library—a place where people were less likely to bother him, as they were there to study themselves, not to socialize. Harry took out a piece of parchment and began to write.

_Dear Snape,_ he started, and then crossed it out.

_Dear Severus_ , he started a second time before crossing it out again.

 

> _Dear Professor,_
> 
> _I hope this letter finds you well and that you’re enjoying your new life away from ~~teaching~~ Hogwarts. Things are utter chaos here, but ~~McGonagall~~ Professor McGonagall is doing a great job making allowances for students who are at so many different levels in their education. I suppose this is the sort of thing that happens after a war._
> 
> _Classes have been really interesting, but it’s been strange to be at Hogwarts without you here. The dungeons simply aren’t the same without your presence. ~~I miss~~ I find myself wanting to speak to you only to be struck by the realization that you aren’t here. I suppose that’s why I’m writing this letter._
> 
> _~~I’d love to hear~~ _ _If it’s not too much trouble, could you let me know what you’re up to these days? After all that we’ve been through, it would be really nice to know that you’re still healthy and doing okay. And before you say it, I know I don’t have any right to ask. I suppose I just hoped you’d tell me anyway._
> 
> _Things are fine here. Professor McGonagall took me very seriously when I told her I wanted to become a Healer, and she’s set me up to do practical training with Madame Pomfrey in the infirmary. I’d really like to thank you for showing me healing spells during the war. You helped me find something I think I can be good at…something that involves helping people instead of hurting them. And it’s nice to have something to fill my time now that I’m no longer playing Quidditch._
> 
> _Regards,_
> 
> _HP_

Harry brought his letter up to the Owlery and chose a sturdy-looking owl to take his message. He suspected that Snape might still live near Cokeworth, where he and Harry’s mother had grown up…but Harry wasn’t _entirely_ certain where he might be sending this owl, so he needed one that could make a lengthy flight if needed.

The next days were as chaotic as the previous, but the nights were fraught and tense as Harry continually questioned the wisdom of having sent the letter in the first place, wondering if Snape would ever write back. He wondered if he’d, perhaps, annoyed Snape to the point that Snape might never speak to him again. After all, it was more than possible that Snape simply wanted to be left alone and wanted no reminders of the war and the damage it had done.

It was over a week later when the familiar owl glided over to Harry’s place in the Great Hall and stopped for him to take the letter. Harry felt his heart beating nearly out of his chest as he took the rolled up pieced of parchment and fed the owl a bit of food from his plate. Part of Harry wanted to tear the letter open right at that moment, but he fought the urge; the last thing he wanted was his friends to question him about it. So he tucked it into his robes and waited until he was back in the dormitory before pulling closed the curtains around his bed and unfolding the letter.

 

> _Potter,_
> 
> _I am doing quite fine. I’m not certain if you realize, but it has been less than a fortnight since we last saw each other. It would do you well to fret less, especially about me. You should remain focused on your schooling._
> 
> _I am currently considering my next course of action, and I have not made any sure decisions yet. Thanks to my mother, I do own my home outright, and I have enough savings to live comfortably for a time until I make a decision._
> 
> _Such a shame you’ve quit Quidditch…Slytherin deserved a challenge for the Cup._
> 
> _SS_
> 
>  

The letter was brusque and largely scolding, and still, Harry felt a rush of warmth in his chest when he read it. The fact that Snape was even responding was a monumental sign—because Snape had no reason to simply _put up_ with him then, not with the war over. Harry didn’t need to save the world for them; Snape no longer needed to protect Harry so he could.

No, Snape had responded to Harry’s letter because, apparently, he’d _wanted_ to—and Harry counted that as a small victory.


	18. October 1998

As time went on, letters got easier to send to Snape. Harry worried less about what he said, spent less time writing things down only to scratch them out. Once he was sure that Snape was at least willing to _respond_ to his letters, and with some sense of consistency, it was less trying overall to try to communicate with the man.

It wasn’t as though Harry had stopped worrying entirely, though. He tried to keep his letters to a frequency that wasn’t overbearing, so he usually waited at least a day or two after he got a response from Snape to write another letter. They were going on a frequency of about once a week, and to Harry’s surprise, Snape was actually telling him things.  They were mostly trivial things, but then, most things seemed fairly trivial after their previous conversations had been, mostly, about how to defeat a certain dark wizard.

Snape did, at least, confide to Harry that he was moving to open his own mail-order potions business. He mentioned to Harry that he was still on the fence about whether or not he would use his own name when advertising the business, worried about whether his notoriety would help or hurt his potential business. He even seemed to be, at the very least, not openly critical of Harry’s input on the situation.

It was when the other students started chattering about the upcoming Hogsmeade trip at Halloween that Harry felt a flush of excitement at the idea that struck him suddenly.  That he could, perhaps, convince Snape to meet him in Hogsmeade—that he could perhaps see the man in person again, hear his voice, and not just imagine it in his mind when he read Snape’s letters.

Naturally, Harry decided to simply broach the topic in his next letter to Snape.

 

> _Professor,_
> 
> _I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said in your last letter, about the idea of whether or not you want to attach your own name to your upcoming business venture. Since it seems like you haven’t settled on an answer yet, it doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to hedge your bets, as it were. As you might remember, the first Hogsmeade trip is scheduled for the end of October, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to have a drink with me while I’m there. It certainly couldn’t hurt your reputation for people to see that we’re still friendly._
> 
> _Of course, I understand if you need to refuse. I know how busy you are. Perhaps I just miss being insulted by you in person._
> 
> _HP_

Harry sent out the letter with a deep feeling of trepidation. After all, there was a good chance that Snape would refuse his request entirely; just because Harry had developed feelings for Snape didn’t mean that Snape had developed anything of the kind for Harry. Being willing to write a letter once every week or two was a lot less to ask than actually traveling all the way to Hogsmeade to see Harry in person. Hell, Snape was smart, far smarter than Harry could even get a grasp on, he sometimes thought. Writing these letters probably took Snape all of five minutes, and just because he was willing to dedicate five minutes to Harry every two weeks certainly didn’t mean that he was willing to throw away several hours of his life.

The next few days were torturous for Harry; he spent most of the time thinking of all the ways that Snape could refuse, and the various sorts of vitriolic language he might use to do so. The worst part of that thought was that it didn’t even depress him—or at least, it didn’t _just_ depress him. The idea of Snape refusing his request with typical scornful language actually created a vague feeling of warmth in Harry’s chest.

“Oh blimey—I’ve got it bad,” Harry breathed to himself as he sat, for once, alone in the Gryffindor common room.

Snape’s response seemed to take forever, but of course, it was about on the regular schedule. It was about a week before he received the response—and only a week out from the upcoming Hogsmeade visit when Snape’s response finally came. Harry unrolled the piece of parchment from the owl’s leg, his heart racing. The parchment seemed smaller than usual, almost unreasonably tiny. The reason became clear as soon as Harry unfurled it.

 

> _The Three Broomsticks, 1 p.m._
> 
> _SS_

The message was short and to the point, but Harry’s heart still soared. Regardless of how clumsy and perhaps even _desperate_ Harry’s letter might have sounded, Snape had agreed, and Harry wasn’t sure why Snape had. Perhaps his appeal to Snape’s conniving side, the possible boost to his reputation, had been enough to convince him. Perhaps he simply appreciated an excuse to get out of the house for a few hours. Or—though Harry barely had the hope to think it—perhaps _he_ wanted to see Harry too.

The day of the Hogsmeade visit dawned dreary and dark, threatening rain from the morning. Hogwarts was decorated cheerily for Halloween—although ‘cheerily’ was perhaps not the best descriptor, since some of Hogwarts’ decorations always tended to be a bit too…realistic.

Madame Pomfrey had already warned Harry not to have _too_ much fun at the Halloween feast that night—because she warned Harry that some of the students tended to take either the ‘trick’ or the ‘treat’ portions of Halloween a _little_ too seriously, and she usually spent the majority of the night treating students in the infirmary for the aftereffects of one or the other. As Harry had taken to helping her in the infirmary three or four nights a week, that meant that Harry, also, would be dealing with the students’ various maladies. Treating minor stomach aches wasn’t precisely the most exciting work, but finding out what kind of bizarre pranks students could pull on each other did sound like it could make for an interesting evening.

“It’s a good thing those Weasley twins have gone—although perhaps not, considering they’ve now commodified their rather creative ideas,” Madame Pomfrey remarked when Harry checked in with her Halloween morning before heading to Hogsmeade with the other students. Harry wasn’t sure whether to be bemused or rather terrified about what the night might bring.

They ate breakfast in the Great Hall before heading out to Hogsmeade. Since Ron and Hermione were still prefects, they broke off from Harry and helped shepherd the younger students toward the nearby town, helping the teachers remind them all of the rules and the time they were to return to the castle.

The trip started pleasantly enough; Harry chatted with Neville on the walk over, which was an altogether pleasant affair. Harry and Neville had a lot more in common than they had once had—other than both being Gryffindors born at the end of summer, of course. Neville had entirely committed to Herbology and spent his time helping Professor Sprout in much the same way that Harry had been helping Madame Pomfrey. Neville, though he had technically been at Hogwarts the whole year, had spent a good portion of his final months there hiding from the Carrows in the Room of Requirement, so he’d chosen to come back until December when he’d be taking his NEWTs.

Harry arrived to Hogsmeade cheerful; he was glad to see how Neville had grown into himself. Apparently knowing what he wanted to do with his life—and feeling like he actually had the bravery to belong in Gryffindor—had done Neville wonders. He’d even begun dating Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott, something Harry would never have imagined Neville possessing the confidence to do a year prior.

The pleasant conversation was enough that he almost managed to forget how nervous he was about seeing Snape again. He wasn’t sure if he was more nervous about the possibility of Snape not showing up or the possibility that he actually _would._ His revelations about his own feelings for his former professor seemed to make everything suddenly that much harder; he felt like a whole new world had opened up for him, one that Snape couldn’t see. Part of him felt like he was at war again, with a secret that he had to keep—only this time, he had been keeping the secret _from_ Snape, not with him.

Harry spent the first few hours in Hogsmeade with Ron and Hermione, browsing the shops. Hermione had a few books she wanted to purchase—because of _course_ she did—but because they so dutifully and without complaint followed her to the bookstore, she didn’t complain as they wandered through Honeydukes and bought an obviously absurd number of sweets. They spent at least an hour in Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, where they took turns talking with Fred and then George while the two of them took turns managing various things in the shop. Harry was happy to see Fred so totally recovered, and seeing him only reaffirmed Harry’s belief that becoming a Healer was the correct decision.

Although Harry had spent most of his morning worrying about his meeting with Snape, when the time came, he felt nothing but calm. It was, he thought, somewhat akin to the feeling he had when he had faced Voldemort that final time—the feeling that, whether he won or lost, at least things would soon be decided.

Harry and Hermione walked with him to the Three Broomsticks before leaving him to his lunch with Snape. The two of them were, for some unfathomable reason, planning to go to Madame Puddifoot’s. The three of them stopped outside the Three Broomsticks.

“Good luck with him,” Ron said after a strange moment of silence—and Harry turned to his friend with a surprised expression. He hadn’t discussed his feelings with Snape with his friend, but apparently either Hermione had told him or he’d managed to put the pieces together himself. Harry might have expected Ron not to approve, but his tone wasn’t disapproving.

“I thought you hated him,” Harry remarked slowly after a moment. Ron shrugged noncommittally.

“He saved all our lives, nearly lost his own in the process. And you have feelings for him. I trust you, Harry, trust your judgment. And if you think he’s worth it, then I’m with you.”

Hermione regarded Ron with a look of bubbling pride, as though she was impressed with her boyfriend for being so mature. There were times when Harry thought that Ron and Hermione were a very mismatched couple—but this was one of the times that reminded him that perhaps Ron really _was_ mature enough for the relationship he found himself in. Harry, for his part, wasn’t sure that _he_ was mature enough for the relationship that he wanted to find himself in.

“Thank you, Ron. You don’t know how much that means to me,” Harry said sincerely. Ron shrugged again.

“Don’t get me wrong, mate. I don’t get what you see in him at all. But I don’t have to shag him, so I guess it’s not my business.”

Hermione practically snorted, and she and Harry exchanged a look, both of them thinking the same thing. Ron was, unmistakably, still Ron.

“Thanks,” said Harry with an exasperated shake of his head. “Enjoy your lunch.”

Ron and Hermione left with a wave, and Harry smiled gently as he saw Ron grasp Hermione’s hand in his as they walked away. He appreciated his friends’ attempts to keep their friendship from changing even as the two of them embarked upon a relationship—and to their credit, Harry had never once felt like a third wheel. To be fair, a lot of their time had been spent working on the castle and then on schoolwork, so that hadn’t exactly left much time for the two of them to act like a couple in front of him.

Leaving those musings behind, Harry pushed the door open and stepped inside the Three Broomsticks.

He looked around slowly, thinking for a moment that Snape hadn’t showed—or at the least, that he hadn’t arrived yet. But after a moment, he finally spotted Snape in the furthest booth in the corner, a drink already in front of him as he surveyed a menu (as though he didn’t already know exactly what the establishment served).  A smile unwittingly creeping onto Harry’s face, he made his way across the room and slid into the booth across from Snape. Snape looked up at him slowly.

“Very little served in this place actually meets the basic requirements of ‘food’,” he remarked in way of a greeting, and Harry laughed softly, somehow relieved to hear Snape acting so much like, well… _Snape_.

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” he murmured with a genial smile. Hogsmeade wasn’t a big enough wizarding town to have much variety in terms of restaurants, which was clearly why Snape had decided to select this place. Certainly better than Madame Puddifoot’s.

A waitress—one Harry didn’t recognize—came over to take their order a few moments later. Harry ordered a Butterbeer, wondering vaguely if that made him seem too immature. Still, he hadn’t quite managed to find a taste for alcohol, although he was legally able to drink it by then.

“You look good,” Harry said once the waitress had deposited his drink on the table. Snape raised an eyebrow at him, as though he didn’t believe the words for a second. Harry _did_ think Snape looked good, but acknowledged that saying so likely wasn’t the best approach with Snape. He knew the man well enough to know that.

“I mean…better,” he fumbled after a moment, Snape’s expression unchanging. “I mean…you look well-rested.”

Snape released a noise that could only be described as a chuckle.

“It’s amazing how much easier it is to relax when one doesn't have to worry about being murdered by a madman or being put in Azkaban for the rest of one’s life,” he remarked matter-of-factly. Harry, for his part, had to agree.

“How are things going with the new venture?” Harry inquired after a moment—partially because he knew he should make small talk before he even _tried_ to broach the topic of his feelings for Snape—and partially because he actually wanted to know. And, surprisingly, Snape actually seemed inclined to tell him.

“I’m working on refining a few potions I’d been working on but hadn’t had the time to finish,” Snape said, taking a sip from his glass. “Also building up stock of certain common potions I presume would be most widely ordered. Pepperup, hangover cures and the like.”

“And still no unexpected side effects from the whole…snake bite and coma business?” Harry broached after a moment, nervous. He still couldn’t help but be worried about Snape; they weren’t sure why he had woken up so suddenly, so Harry couldn’t help but wonder if his condition could deteriorate again just as quickly. But Snape looked healthy—healthier, probably, than he’d been since Harry had known him.

“Once you’re a full-fledged Healer, will you continue to be this much of a nag?”

Snape raised his eyebrow as he spoke, but it was clear that he wasn’t actually angry. Were he angry, his response certainly would have been much more acerbic.

“I’m sorry. I just worry.”

Snape sighed, shaking his head in exasperation.

“I give you my word that if I experience anything out of the ordinary, I’ll contact Poppy immediately.”

Harry was struck silent for a moment, surprised to hear those words out of Snape’s mouth. Snape wasn’t one to give vows like that lightly—nor was he, in Harry’s experience, one to indulge anyone else’s worry about him. Perhaps Snape _did_ care for Harry, in a more substantial sense than just wanting to keep him alive. That gave Harry a moment of confidence.

“Good,” he said seriously. “Because if anything were to happen to you, I don’t know what I’d do. Snape—Severus, I—”

Snape held up a hand.

“Stop, Potter—stop.” The word got gentler the second time Snape said it. “I know what you’re going to say, and don’t you dare say it.”

Harry’s heart was fluttering uncontrollably in his chest.

“You…do?”

“Perhaps not exactly—you do manage to surprise me with your…sometimes questionable linguistic choices,” Snape remarked with a smirk, although it disappeared after a moment to be replaced with a sincerer expression. “But whatever it is you think you’re feeling, Potter—you’re not. We went through a very trying experience together, and those kinds of experiences…they can fool you. Make you confuse feelings of gratitude or camaraderie for…something else.”

Harry swallowed thickly, wondering if Snape been using Legilimency or if he was really just that obvious.

“I’m not confusing anything,” he said after a moment, his heartbeat thundering in his ears. “I know how I feel.”

Snape shook his head. “I don’t think you do. You’re eighteen, Potter. Your two closest friends have begun a romantic relationship, and you’re at a loss. But you’ve scarcely been able to _live_ yourself. You can’t possibly know what you want, not mere months after the thing that’s been plaguing your life for so many years has been taken away. You haven’t had a chance to live without the spectre of the Dark Lord hovering over your shoulder.”

Harry shook his head, the absolute absurdity of this conversation beginning to strike him. He’d certainly been prepared for Snape to turn him down; what he hadn’t expected was for Snape to not even give him an opportunity to confess his feelings in the first place, and then give him a convoluted argument about why it would be a bad idea.

 “I’m finally free to do what I want,” he insisted, looking into Snape’s eyes. Because Snape’s protests had all been about _Harry_ —none of them had been that Snape simply didn’t want him. And that was encouraging. “And so are you.”

Snape sighed.

“The answer is no, Potter…Harry,” he amended after a moment, his tone somewhat resigned, though surprisingly not unkind. “Not now. Not when you’re barely discovering who you are.”

Harry opened his mouth to protest, but Snape held up a hand to halt his words.

“You’ve grown up a lot in the past few years—you’ve had to. And you can argue that you’re more mature than a lot of your peers because of that, and very likely that is true. But these things that you’ve experienced…they’ve robbed you of your teenage years in a very fundamental way. You should be enjoying this freedom to have fun, fool around, date—not anchor yourself to your old Potions professor.”

Harry shook his head.

“You’re not that old, Sir,” he ventured hopefully.

Snape openly snorted at that.

“I’m the same age as your parents would be, or had you forgotten about that?”

Harry couldn’t argue with that point—although he found that he didn’t particularly care about it. It was difficult to be bothered by that fact considering that he’d never known his parents—something awful in its own right, but not exactly an obstacle to being with Severus Snape. So he decided to try a different tactic.

“Okay. What if I do that? What if I have fun, fool around, date…and then I decide I still want _you_?”

It felt strange to actually give voice to that—because Snape had headed him off before he could even make a confession, and they’d been talking mostly in obtuse statements since then. Snape let his eyes fall closed for a long minute before he opened them again.

“I suppose we could discuss that rather unlikely outcome when it were to happen,” he acquiesced, finally.

Harry grinned—it definitely wasn't an outright ‘no,’ and it wasn’t Snape saying that he wasn’t interested. As far as Harry could tell, Snape was afraid Harry was settling for him because he was mistaking feelings of gratitude for romantic ones, and Harry felt fairly assured that he could convince Snape that that wasn’t the case.

“Okay,” Harry said again. “And how long must I date and ‘have fun’ before we can revisit this conversation?”

Snape shook his head.

“You are absolutely incorrigible, Potter,” he said, although he still answered the question. “I won’t hear another word about this until you’ve finished school, at least.”

Harry felt his heart dancing in his chest, which was strange, since Snape had basically completely shut down his advances. But the important part was that he hadn’t shut them down _forever_ —and it was less than a year until he finished school.

“I won’t bring it up again, then—for now,” Harry promised, just as the waitress appeared with two steaming plates of food. Snape’s expression was inscrutable as he turned to begin his meal, and Harry dropped it—for the time being.


End file.
